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Updated: June 20, 2025
A sharp skirmish ensued between the two parties, in which several whites and Indians were wounded, but the Indians being mounted and the citizens on foot, the former succeeded in rounding up the herd and driving it down the river beyond the reach of Gibbon's men.
Never before was a religious transformation so manifestly inevitable." Gibbon's sneering tone was a characteristic of his time. There existed during the latter part of the eighteenth century, wrote Sir James Mackintosh, "an unphilosophical and indeed fanatical animosity against Christianity." But Gibbon's private defense is entitled to consideration as placing him in a better light.
They are the historians of the empire in its decline and miseries. Gibbon's history is doubtless the best in English. He may be compared with Tillemont's Hist, des Emperors. Sheppard has written an interesting and instructing book on this period, but it pertains especially to the rise of the new barbaric states.
If Johnson was thinking of him, he differed widely in opinion from Gibbon, who describes North as 'a consummate master of debate, who could wield with equal dexterity the arms of reason and of ridicule. Gibbon's Misc. Works, i. 221. On May 2, 1775, he wrote: If they turned out Lord North to-morrow, they would still leave him one of the best companions in the kingdom. Ib. ii. 135.
As Gibbon's pocket-nerve was sensitive, it may be he was also thinking of the £1300 he had invested in 1784 in the new loan of the King of France, deeming the French funds as solid as the English.
The mere fixing the look on any single object for a long time may produce very strange effects. Gibbon's well-known story of the monks of Mount Athos and their contemplative practice is often laughed over, but it has a meaning. They were to shut the door of the cell, recline the beard and chin on the breast, and contemplate the abdominal centre.
What do you think, sir? a set of the common quarto edition of the Delphini classics, copies of Newton's works and Bacon's works, Gibbon's Decline and Fall, and so forth nothing better, I declare to you: and to call that a collection!"
It was indeed created upon a pile of miscellaneous matter left by British troops when they were stationed on the British Columbian mainland. There was much rubbish on the shelves, but among the rubbish I found many good books. For instance, that winter I read solidly through Gibbon's Rome, and refreshed my early memories of Mahomet, of Alaric, and of Attila.
He says he could never read through a second-rate book, and he therefore read masterpieces only; "after Milton, then Shakspeare; then Ossian; then Junius; Paine's 'Common Sense; Swift's 'Tale of a Tub; 'Joan of Arc; Schiller's 'Robbers; Burger's 'Lenora; Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall; and long afterward, Tasso, Dante, De Staël, Schlegel, Hazlitt, and the 'Westminster Review." Reading of this character might have been expected to lead to something; and was well calculated to make an extraordinary impression on such a mind as Elliott's; and we have the fruit of this course of study in the poetry which from this time he began to throw off.
Compare Cowper's humble home at Olney with Gibbon's elegant library at Lausanne, the social environment of Hallam, Grote, or Macaulay with the rustic isolation of Wordsworth, the economies of Shelley, or the life-struggle of Jerrold.
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