writer of it; perhaps we think it would be easy for us or anybody to write such another, if we would only forget conventionalisms and have the courage of our impressions; but if we made trial, I daresay we should find that to forget conventionalisms is just what we can't and do not know how to do; and so our impressions get bundled into the swathings of an ambitious rhetoric which spoils our chances and vulgarizes effort. I do not say Boswell was a very high-toned man or a very capable man in most directions; but he did have the art of easy narrative to a most uncommon degree; and did clearly perceive and apprehend just those points and qualities which go to make a portraiture complete and satisfying.1 I do not believe that he stupidly blundered into doing his biographic work well; stupid blundering never did and never could accomplish work that will meet acceptance by the intelligence of the world. 1 1 There is, to be sure, a great deal of what the natural reserve of most men would lead them to withhold. But if this "free-telling" does add some of the finer lights and most artistic touches to his picture, and if he perceives this to be so (and have we any right to assume the contrary?) shall we not credit it rightly to his bookmaking art and commend it accordingly? That his gentlemanly reserves are not of a pronounced sort may count against the delicacy of his nature, but not necessarily against his capacity as a literary artist. GIBBON I COME now to speak of a more respectable personage-one of whom you have often heard, and whose resounding periods, full of Roman History you will most surely have read; I mean Edward Gibbon1-not an original member of the club, but elected at an early day. His life has great interest. He was the sole survivor of seven children; his father being a Member of Parliament-very reputable, but very inefficient. There were fears that his famous son would be a cripple for life, so weakly was he, and so ill put together; but growing stronger, he went to Oxford; was there for only a short time; did not love Oxford then, or ever; inclined to theologic inquiry and became Romanist; which so angered his father that he sent him to Lausanne, Switzerland, to be re-converted under the Calvinist teachers of that region to Protestantism. This in due time came about; and it was perhaps by 1Edward Gibbon, b. 1737; d. 1794. Dr. Milman's is the standard edition of his History. Bowdler's edition (1825) is noticeable for its expurgations. The work, through its translations, holds as large a place in the historic curriculum of French, Italian, and German students, as in that of English-speaking nations. a sort of compensating mental retaliation for this topsy-turvy condition of his youth that he assumed and cultivated the pugnacious indifference to religion which so marked all his later years and much of his work. He had his love passages, too, there upon the beautiful borders of Lake Geneva; a certain Mademoiselle Curchod, daughter of a Protestant clergyman, lived near by; and with her the future historian read poetry, read philosophy, read the skies and the mountains, discoursed upon the conjugation of verbs, and upon conjugalities of other sorts; but this the English father disapproved as much as he had disapproved of Romanism; and by reason of this-as Gibbon tells us, in his delightful autobiography-that "sweet dream came to an end." It is true the French biographers1 put a rather different phase upon the story, and represent that while Mademoiselle respected young Mr. Gibbon very much, she could not return his ardor. Two colors, I have observed, are very commonly given to any sudden interruption of such festivities. Mademoiselle, however, did not pine in single blessedness; she had a career before her. 1 Biographie Universelle; Article Necker (Mme. Necker, neé Susanne Curchod). She became in a few years the distinguished wife of Necker, the great finance minister of France in the days immediately preceding the Revolution, and the mother of a still more famous daughter-that Mme. de Stael who wrote Corinne. Though Gibbon lived and died a bachelor, he always maintained friendly relations with his old flame Mme. Necker, being frequently a guest at her elegant Paris home; and she, on at least one occasion, a guest of the historian in London. It was in the year 1774-ten years after its foundation, that Gibbon was elected member of the Literary Club; he being then in his thirty-seventh year and well known for his wide learning and his conversational powers. He was recognized as an author, too, of critical acumen, and great range of language; some of his earlier treatises were written in French, which he knew as well as English; German he never knew; but the first volume of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire did not appear until the year 1776—a good tag for that great American date! That first volume made a prodigious surprise, and immense applause. Poor Hume1 (whose story 1 Hume's first volume of English History appeared in 1754-just twenty-two years before the Decline and Fall. Hume was about twenty-six years Gibbon's senior. waits), struggling with the mortal disease which was to carry him off in that year, wrote his praises from Edinburgh. Horace Walpole, who had the vanity of professing to know everybody worth knowing, says, "I am astonished; I know the man a little; I could not believe it was in him; I must get to know him better." He Yet Gibbon was not a modest man in the ordinary sense; never, except when-very rarely-warmed into a colloquial display of his extraordinary learning, did he impress a stranger with any sense of his power. was short and corpulent; had a waddling walk and puffy cheeks and a weak double chin; with very much in his general aspect and manner to explain the miscarriage of his love-affair, and nothing at all to explain the Decline of the Roman Empire. Withal, he was obsequious, studiously courteous; had ready smiles at command; had a mincing manner; his wig was always in order, and so was his flowered waistcoat; and he tapped his snuff-box with an easy dégagé air, that gave no warrant for anything more than an agreeable titillation of the nerves. But if an opening came for a thrust of his cumulated learning in establishing some historic point in dispute, it poured out with a |