GIBBON. 293 



The greater number of the Italian cities he visited, but 

 it was in Rome that he made the longest stay, remaining 

 there between four and five months of the eleven which 

 he passed beyond the Alps. It was also at Rome that 

 he formed the plan of writing his great work. The idea 

 entered his mind while, "on the 15th of October, he sat 

 musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while bare-footed 

 friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter," 

 ('Life/ chap, vi.,) a striking picture surely, and one in 

 which the image of the Roman Decline and Fall appears 

 to be shadowed forth with sufficient distinctness. To the 

 original idea, indeed, it was still more akin : for he at 

 first only contemplated a History of the Eternal City's 

 decay. 



His second visit to Lausanne had given him the im- 

 portant accession to his comfort of Lord Sheffield's 

 acquaintance, then Mr. Holroyd, who accompanied him 

 into Italy, and proved ever after his most intimate and 

 confidential friend. He was a person of cultivated mind, 

 but filled more with details than with principles, and 

 those details relating to statistics and commercial facts, 

 rather than to the more classical pursuits of Gibbon. 

 His opinions were framed on a contracted scale, and the 

 matters presented by the old and unphilosophical 

 school. He had no genius in his views, no point or spirit 

 in his composition ; he frequently, however, addressed his 

 moderate number of readers through the press, each com- 

 mercial question, as it were, producing a work of accurate 

 detail, of narrow views, of inconsistent reasoning, and of 

 unreadable dryness. But his life of bad pamphlets was 

 varied by a gallant resistance, which he made at the head 

 of his Yeomanry Cavalry, to the No-Popery mob of 



