278 GIBBON. 



truth than those which they have left of their own 

 studies. " Ac plerique suam ipsi yitam narrare, fiduciam 

 potius morum quam arrogantiam arbitrati sunt: nee id 

 Rutilio et Scauro citra fidem aut obtrectationi fuit. Adeo 

 virtutes iisdem temporibus optime sestimantur quibus 

 facillime gignuntur." (Tacit. ' Vit. Ag/ cap. i.) 



Guided in part by the light of his own description, in 

 part by that which his correspondence sheds, we have 

 traced the history of one of these great historians. We 

 are now to follow that of the other with similar advan- 

 tages from the lights of his own pen. 



Edward Gibbon was descended from a considerable 

 and ancient family settled in the county of Kent, and 

 landowners there as early as the beginning of the four- 

 teenth century. Their respectability may be judged 

 from the circumstance that in Edward III/s reign John 

 Gibbon, the head of the house, was king's architect, and 

 received the grant of a hereditary toll in Stonar Passage, 

 as a reward for the construction of Queenborough Castle. 

 One of the family, in Henry the Sixth's reign, married 

 Fiennes, Lord Say and Sele, the Lord High Treasurer; 

 and from him the historian descended in the eleventh 

 generation, belonging to a younger branch of the Gibbons 

 which settled in London in the reign of James I., and 

 engaged in commerce. His grandfather acquired in these 

 pursuits considerable wealth, and was at the end of 

 Queen Anne's reign commissioner of the customs, to- 

 gether with Prior the poet. His family had always been 

 of the Tory party, and his promotion came from the 

 Queen's Tory Ministry. In 1716 he became a director of 

 the South Sea Company, and he was proved to have then 

 been possessed of above a hundred thousand pounds, all 



