he left it in his own hand. A very silly epigram on the issue of Pope's Iliad declared that—

'After ages shall with wonder seek,

Who 'twas translated Homer into Greek!'

The wonder of our own age is-Who was it that so greatly improved the stately eloquence of Edward Gibbon?

The Autobiography, as printed by Lord Sheffield and as known to us, opens with a paragraph taken from 'Memoir A,' the earliest of all, of which Lord Sheffield printed only a few sentences. Even of this paragraph he printed only fourteen lines and dropped the rest. He then cuts as many lines out of the Seventh Sketch, but much transposes it and curtails it. Next, he clips a bit from 'Memoir A' with the same treatment, adding the splendid and famous piece about Fielding and the Imperial House of Hapsburg-a real purpureus pannus-which he clipped from Sketch Seven. Then with snippets from 'A' again, he gives us a page from 'B'; and then he proceeds with 'Memoir F'— 'my family is originally derived from the county of Kent'―omitting, transposing, softening, and refitting the whole as he goes along. And so, when he comes to the peroration, he elevates a passage from the notes into the text, and degrades Gibbon's own finale of twenty lines from the text into a note. And yet most readers will feel that both the opening and the close of the Autobiography have greatly gained by the process of this amazing revision, and that the author of the Decline and Fall did not compose his periods with all the grace and point displayed by the unknown author of this rifacimento.

Of Memoir A,' the earliest of all (1788-89), with

nearly forty pages, Lord Sheffield printed barely one. It is occupied mainly with family history and heraldic lore. It was perhaps rightly judged to be hardly important enough to print at the time, but it will be read with interest by many genealogists. It is a warning to all learned persons not to meddle with learning outside their own field-ne sutor ultra crepidam-when we find the historian of the civilised world over a period of a thousand years making an odd blunder in an elementary point of Heraldry. He makes much fun about his ancestor Edmond Gibbon having changed the three scallop-shells in the family coat into three Ogresses, or 'female monsters,' in revenge upon three of his kinswomen with whom he had a law-suit. Now, 'Ogress' in Heraldry (said to be a corruption of Old French ogoesse) is simply the same as pellet, and pellet is simply a roundle sable. The variation of a pellet for a scallop-shell is obvious enough; and the historian's ponderous humour about the savage women and his ancestor's 'whimsical revenge' is pure nonsense: the melancholy blundering of a philosopher when he launches out into a study of which he had not mastered the ordinary terms.

Of Memoir D,' with twenty-five pages, Lord Sheffield did not print a line, and it contains little that was not said elsewhere. Although it is interesting to us for purposes of collation and as a study of style, it was in no way essential for Lord Sheffield's object. The short Fragment, number Seven, contained little but the stately passages we know so well about the family of Confucius, of the Spencers, and the Fieldings. Gibbon's own Testament and a good Index complete the volume, in which the present Earl of Sheffield assures us in his Introduction-'every piece contained

in this volume as the work of Edward Gibbon is now printed exactly as he wrote it, without suppression or emendation.'

The casual reader, it may be, will be a little puzzled at the first glance at the book to distinguish the variety of forms which the narrative assumes in draft after draft. But to the student of English literature, the gradual evolution of a splendid and classical piece cannot fail to be suggestive and fascinating. What a medley of Gibbonian antitheses and 'philosophic humour is now unveiled without 'the obscurity of a learned language'!—'The frequent imposition of oaths had enlarged and fortified the Jacobite conscience '— 'had not our alliance preceded her marriage, I should be less confident of my descent from the Whetnalls of Peckham'-'In the life of every man of letters . . . the most important part of his education is that which he bestows on himself'-'it was with much reluctance and ill-humour that the envious bard [Voltaire] allowed the representation of the Iphigénie of Racine 'had I been more indigent or more wealthy, I should not have possessed the leisure or the perseverance to prepare and execute my voluminous history''Wretched is the author, and wretched will be the work, where daily diligence is stimulated by daily hunger.'

Another chapter deals with the Letters, now published complete in two handsome volumes, threefourths of them being quite new, and most of them for the first time to be read in their complete form. They cannot fail to raise our estimate of the writer. We knew how genial, how good-natured, how sensible he was. But we had no adequate means of gauging his thoroughly affectionate nature, his sense of his family.

duties, and his placid temper under unmerited troubles. He shows himself throughout a good son to a spendthrift father, who almost ruined his son's whole life, and to a somewhat exacting stepmother of a most uncongenial nature. His really passionate affection for his friends is a striking and beautiful quality, when we consider the worldly society and the unromantic age in which his life was cast. Recluses like Cowper, poets like Shelley, have filled the history of literature with some famous examples of soul-sympathy. But alas! the hates and quarrels of authors fill many more pages than their friendships and their intimacies, unless they be of a scandalous sort. But the unique charm of Gibbon's letters lies in their picture of domestic tenderness, in their freedom from any shadow of enmity toward any one, and even from a trace of literary disputes. The really beautiful intimacy between the historian and the Sheffield family is a bright spot in the annals of literature. He managed to combine the life of a Horace Walpole and a Samuel Johnson without the cynicism of the one or the fierceness of the other. All students of the latter half of the eighteenth century will find much to interest them in Gibbon's familiar touches on the social and political life of the time. And American readers in particular will eagerly follow all he has to narrate about the War of Independence. Gibbon is no profound statesman, nor a consummate painter of manners: he is neither the wit nor the 'philosopher' he imagines himself to be. But in his familiar outpourings to his bosom friends, he never fails to show us in an age most artificial, unheroic, and coarse, the Ciceronian ideal of the mitis sapientia Læli.

CHAPTER XI

NEW LETTERS OF GIBBON 1

THE two volumes of Gibbon's Letters now first published with his Memoirs are most pleasant reading; they throw new light on the character of the historian and his age; and they are thoroughly well edited and annotated. The so-called 'Letters' that the first Lord Sheffield gave to the world just a hundred years ago were merely scraps, cuttings, and occasional specimens culled from the great mass which the third Earl now gives to the curious public. Most of the personal history, all the scandal, and many of the piquant epigrams were withheld by the prudence of the noble executor and the prudery of his daughter. Those who wish to look into the inner life of one of the greatest of English men of letters, and into British society at home and abroad in the first half of the reign of George III., may now study both in the exact transcript of Gibbon's Familiar Letters.

The 'fierce light that beats upon' a great name now reveals to us the historian as one of the most genial, affectionate, sanę, and contented natures in literary history-with a genius for friendship, indulgent almost to a fault toward all failings, gently fond of all pleasant things and people, and willing to put up with much for

1 Private Letters of Edward Gibbon (1753-1794). Edited by Rowland E. Prothero. 2 vols. John Murray, 1896.