202 



GIBBON 



at once, it is said, a distance of forty feet. The 

 Wow- wow (H. leuciscus) is a gibbon found in 

 Malacca and the Sunda Isles. H. leucogenys is 

 from Siam. The Hoolock (H. Hoolock) is a 

 native of the Garrow Hills. The Siamang (H. 

 syndactylus), a Sumatran species, differs from the 

 rest of the genus in having the first and second 

 fingers of the hinder extremities united together 

 up to the second joint ; it resembles the Orang 

 (q.v. ), and differs from the true gibbons in having 

 a large air-sac opening into the windpipe. All the 

 gibbons are of gentle disposition, and easily domes- 

 ticated. At present the gibbons are confined to 

 south-eastern Asia and some of the larger islands 

 bordering upon the continent, but it is possible 

 that Dryopitliecus found fossil in Tertiary strata of 

 the south of France, of the size of a man, is refer- 

 able to the same group. See figure of the skeleton 

 at ANTHROPOID APES. 



Gibbon, EDWARD, the greatest of English, 

 perhaps of all historians, was born at Putney, near 

 London, 27th April (8th May in new style) 1737, the 

 eldest, and sole survivor beyond the years of infancy, 

 of the seven children of Ed ward 'Gibbon and of 

 Judith Porten. In Gibbon's case the task of the 

 biographer has been made easy by his own auto- 

 biography, which comes down to within five years 

 of his death, and which with all its exquisite art 

 is perhaps the most veracious example of its class 

 in the English tongue. Gibbon's parents were 

 both of good family ; his father, a country gentle- 

 man of a nature kindly but weak, and himself the 

 son of an able financier who lost a fortune in the 

 South Sea bubble, and made another before his 

 death. The boy's childhood was sickly from a 

 strange nervous affection, which contracted his 

 legs alternately and caused excruciating pain. 

 The very preservation of his life he ascribed to the 

 more than maternal care of his aunt, Catherine 

 Porten, whose devotion he repaid witli a constant 

 affection. His studies were desultory perforce, 

 and two miserable years at Westminster was all 

 the regular schooling that he got. After his four- 

 teenth year his weakness began to disappear, and 

 his father, without permitting him to wait until 

 he was adequately prepared, carried him off to 

 Magdalen College, and entered him as a gentle- 

 man commoner, April 3, 1752. At no period 

 in its history had Oxford readied such a depth 

 of degeneracy. ' The fellows of my time,' says 

 Gibbon, ' were decent easy men who supinely 

 enjoyed the gifts of the founder ; their days were 

 filled by a series of uniform employments ; the 

 chapel and the hall, the coffee-house and the 

 common room, till they retired, weary and well 

 satisfied, to a long slumber. From the toil of 

 reading, or thinking, or writing, they had absolved 

 their conscience ; and the first shoots of learning 

 and ingenuity withered in the ground, without 

 yielding any fruits to the owners or the public. . . . 

 Their conversation stagnated in a round of college 

 business, Tory politics, personal anecdotes, and 

 private scandal ; their dull and deep potations 

 excused the brisk intemperance of youth ; and 

 their constitutional toasts were not expressive of 

 the most lively loyalty for the house of Hanover.' 

 Such was the atmosphere into which Gibbon was 

 flung at the age of fifteen, ' with a stock of erudi- 

 tion which might have puzzled a doctor, and a 

 degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy might 

 have been ashamed,' and here he spent fourteen 

 inonths ' the most idle and unprofitable of my 

 whole life ; the reader will pronounce between 

 the school and the scholar.' From his childhood 

 he had been fond of religious disputation, and his 

 incuvaions into the bewildering mazes of a great 

 controversy made him at sixteen a convert to the 

 Church of Rome, and shut the gates of Oxford 



upon him. His father next placed him under the 

 care of the poet and deist Mallet, but by his philo- 

 sophy the young enthusiast was 'rather scandalised 

 than reclaimed.' To effect his cure from popery 

 he was next sent to Lausanne to board in the 

 house of a Calvinist minister, M. Pavilliard, a poor 

 but worthy and intelligent man, who judiciously 

 suggested books and arguments to his young 

 charge, and had the satisfaction of seeing him 

 reconverted to Protestantism. Gibbon tells us 

 that ' the various articles of the Romish creed 

 disappeared like a dream ; and after a full con- 

 viction, on Christmas-day 1754, I received the 

 sacrament in the church of Lausanne. It was 

 here that I suspended my religious inquiries, 

 acquiescing with implicit belief in the tenets arid 

 mysteries which are adopted by the general con- 

 sent of Catholics and Protestants.' He lived for 

 nearly five years in M. Pavilliard's house, respect- 

 ing the minister, and enduring with greater or 

 less equanimity the ' uncleanly avarice ' of his 

 wife ; and here he began and carried out with rare 

 steadfastness of purpose those private studies in 

 French literature, but especially in the Latin 

 classics, which, aided by his prodigious memory, 

 made him a master of erudition without a superior, 

 and with hardly an equal. Here also he fell in love 

 with Mademoiselle Suzanne Curchod, the beauti- 

 ful and accomplished daughter of the obscure 

 minister of Grassy, who lived to become the wife 

 of the great French minister and financier, M. 

 Necker, and the mother of the gifted Madame de 

 Stael. He found on his return to England that 

 his father would not hear of the 'strange alliance,' 

 and in the calm reflection of thirty years later he 

 adds, ' After a painful struggle I yielded to my 

 fate ; I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son ; my 

 wound was insensibly healed by time, absence, 

 and the habits of a new life. My cure was?, 

 accelerated by a faithful report of the tranquillity 

 and cheerfulness of the lady herself, and my loves 

 subsided in friendship and esteem.' They remained, 

 constant friends in later life, and the former lover 

 during a visit to Paris (1765) visited her daily in 

 her salon, ' soft, yielding, humble, and decorous to 

 a fault,' as Madame Necker describes him in a 

 familiar letter to a friend. 



Gibbon returned to his father's house in 1758. 

 He was well received, and ' ever after continued on 

 the same terms of equal and easy politeness.' He 

 became much attached to his step-mother, and the 

 two ' easily adopted the tender names and genuine 

 characters of mother and son.' He brought with 

 him the first pages of a little book which at length 

 he published in 1761 in French, under the title of 

 Essai s'tir I'fitude de la Litterature. He had joined 

 the Hampshire militia, and for the next two and 

 a half years led a wandering life of military servi- 

 tude as a captain an irksome discipline, but one 

 which he admits was not unprofitable to him. 

 ' The discipline and evolutions of a modern bat- 

 talion gave me a clearer notion of the phalanx and 

 the legion ; and the captain of Hampshire grena- 

 diers ( the reader may smile ) has not been useless 

 to the historian of the Roman empire.' Meantime 

 he revolved within his mind many projects for a 

 historical work, and, the militia being disbanded, 

 visited Paris and Lausanne, and extended his 

 travels into Italy. 'It was at Rome,' he tells us, 

 'on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing 

 amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare- 

 footed friars were singing vespers in the temple of 

 Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and 

 fall of the city first started into my mind. But 

 my original plan was circumscribed to the decay of 

 the city rather than of the empire ; and though my 

 reading and reflections began to point towards that 

 object, some years elapsed, and several avocations 



