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"He did not say what business brought him here, I presume?" "No, he was hardly in condition to say much; he was pretty full," said Leonard, with a laugh. "However, he wants me to call upon him to-morrow, and may tell me then." "He wants you to call upon him?" "Yes, uncle." "Are you going?" "Yes; why shouldn't I?" "I see no reason," said Gibbon, hesitating.
At the same time many are unpolite, not because they mean to be so, but because they are awkward, and perhaps know no better. Thus, when Gibbon had published the second and third volumes of his "Decline and Fall," the Duke of Cumberland met him one day, and accosted him with, "How do you do, Mr. Gibbon? I see you are always at it in the old way scribble, scribble, scribble!"
Gibbon speaks of Pagan priests who, 'under sacerdotal robes, concealed the heart of an Atheist. Now, these priests were also the philosophers of Rome, and it is not impossible that some modern philosophical priests, like their Pagan prototypes, secretly despise the religion they openly profess. Avarice, and lust of power, are potent underminers of human virtue.
Need I mention Gibbon, or Froude, or Lingard, or Freeman, or the novelists? To my mind the terrific task shadowed forth by the genial orator was enough to scare the last remnant of resolution from the souls of his toil-worn audience.
The drawing-room had a bow window looking over the fields towards the South, and this way too looked the dining-room, in which Magdalen bestowed whatever was least interesting, such as the "Hume and Smollett" and "Gibbon" of her grandfather's library and her own school books, from which she hoped to teach Thekla. Her upstairs arrangements had for the moment been rather disturbed by Mrs.
Four hundred were maintained in a single palace, at a comparatively early period; a freedman in the time of Augustus left behind him forty-one hundred and sixteen; Horace regarded two hundred as the suitable establishment for a gentleman; some senators owned twenty thousand. Gibbon estimates the number of slaves at about sixty millions, one-half of the whole population.
Maximin succeeded, whose feats of strength, when he first courted the notice of the Emperor Severus, have been described by Gibbon. He was at that period a Thracian peasant; since then he had risen gradually to high offices; but, according to historians, he retained his Thracian brutality to the last.
The lives of many of these Fathers of the Desert were written by the Christians who lived at the same time; but a full account of the miracles which were said to have been worked in their favour, or by their means, would now only call forth a smile of pity, or perhaps even of ridicule. "Prosperity and peace," says Gibbon, "introduced the distinction of the vulgar and the ascetic Christians.
Gibbon knew he did not say. "To think of Bernard being a common soldier a private!" Bessie began again, and shook once more with sobs. "If he comes here, Deleah, do you think he will expect us to walk out with him? We can never be seen with Bernard again never! Never! Never!" She had quarrelled continually with Bernard, but she had been fond of him, and proud of his good looks.
The decline and fall of the Spanish Empire does not challenge the imagination like the decline and fall of that other Empire with which alone it can be compared, possibly because no Gibbon has chronicled its greatness. Yet its dissolution affected profoundly the history of three continents.
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