Monarchists

"Life was given to me as a favor, so I may abandon it when it is one no longer."

"I write to thee on this subject, [friend], because I am angry at a book which I have just left, which is so large, that it seems to contain universal science, but it hath almost split my head, without teaching me anything."

"Of all kind of authors there are none I despise more than compilers, who search every where for shreds of other men's works, which they join to their own, like so many pieces of green turf in a garden: they are not at all superior to compositors in a printing house, who range the types, which, collected together, make a book, towards which they contribute nothing but the labours of the hand. I would have original writers respected, and it seems to me a kind of profanation to take those pieces from the sanctuary in which they reside, and to expose them to a contempt they do not deserve. When a man hath nothing new to say, why does not he hold his tongue? What business have we with this double employment?"

"And yet there is nothing so badly imagined: nature seems to have provided, that the follies of men should be transient, but they by writing books render them permanent. A fool ought to content himself with having wearied those who lived with him: but he is for tormenting future generations; he is desirous that his folly should triumph over oblivion, which he ought to have enjoyed as well as his grave; he is desirous that posterity should be informed that he lived, and that it should be known for ever that he was a fool."

"History is full of religious wars; but, we must take care to observe, it was not the multiplicity of religions that produced these wars, it was the intolerating spirit which animated that one which thought she had the power of governing."

"Christians are beginning to lose the spirit of intolerance which animated them: experience has shown the error of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and of the persecution of those Christians in France whose belief differed a little from that of the king. They have realized that zeal for the advancement of religion is different from a due attachment to it; and that in order to love it and fulfill its behests, it is not necessary to hate and persecute those who are opposed to it."

"Oh, how empty is praise when it reflects back to its origin!"

"People here argue about religion interminably, but it appears that they are competing at the same time to see who can be the least devout."

"In France there are three kinds of professions: the church, the sword, and the long robe. Each hath a sovereign contempt for the other two. For example, a man who ought to be despised only for being a fool is often so because he is a lawyer."

"A man should be mourned at his birth, not at his death."

"Do you think that God will punish them for not practicing a religion which he did not reveal to them?"

"I can assure you that no kingdom has ever had as many civil wars as the kingdom of Christ."

"[The Pope] will make the king believe that three are only one, that the bread he eats is not bread...and a thousand other things of the same kind."

"[The Ottoman Empire] whose sick body was not supported by a mild and regular diet, but by a powerful treatment, which continually exhausted it."

"Not to be loved is a misfortune, but it is an insult to be loved no longer."

"The laws of Rome had wisely divided public power among a large number of magistracies, which supported, checked and tempered each other. Since they all had only limited power, every citizen was qualified for them, and the people — seeing many persons pass before them one after the other — did not grow accustomed to any in particular. But in these times the system of the republic changed. Through the people the most powerful men gave themselves extraordinary commissions — which destroyed the authority of the people and magistrates, and placed all great matters in the hands of one man, or a few."

"In a free nation, it matters not whether individuals reason well or ill; it is sufficient that they do reason. Truth arises from the collision and from hence springs liberty, which is a security from the effects of reasoning."

"If one only wished to be Sad, this could be horrible for the rest of civilisation; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are."

"I cannot repress my indignation at the use of those foolish obsolete, odious, words Whig and Tory."

"Though what Gibbon calls ‘the curiosity of the public’ may have exhausted itself long since, the candid judgment of many generations and of almost every class of readers has confirmed the opinion formed at once by Gibbon's own age. His great work remains an enduring monument of research, an imperishable literary possession and one of the highest encouragements to intellectual endeavour that can be found in the history of letters."

"The penetration, solidity, and taste, that made you the first of historians, dear Sir, prevent my being surprised at your being the best writer of controversial pamphlets too. I have read you with more precipitation than such a work deserved, but I could not disobey you and detain it. Yet even in that hurry I could discern, besides a thousand beauties and strokes of wit, the inimitable eighty-third page, and the conscious dignity that you maintain throughout over your monkish antagonists. When you are so superior in argument, it would look like insensibility to the power of your reasoning, to select transient passages for commendation; and yet I must mention one that pleased me particularly, from the delicacy of the severity, and from its novelty too; it is, ‘Bold is not the word.’ This is the feathered arrow of Cupid, that is more formidable than the club of Hercules."

"Gibbon was not interested in religious doctrine, though he amused himself with its speculative refinements. But religion and Churches, he would admit, are a social and psychological necessity, and the particular forms which they take are important, for they can influence the progress or decline of civilization. Therefore the historical question he asked was, did the ideas of Christianity and the organization of the Church, as adapted to the Roman Empire, generate or stifle public spirit, freedom, and the advancement of knowledge and a plural society. His answer was that they stifled it. If Christianity had first been established in independent city-states like those of Greece, perhaps it would have assumed a different and more useful form – as it eventually did in the communes of Italy and, more successfully, in the Protestant cities of Switzerland. But the very fact of its establishment by imperial power, as an ideological support to that power, made it subservient to a centralized, monopolist system whose organization and absolutism, in its own formative period, it imitated and sustained."

"Gibbon's historical philosophy was...animated by...what we now call "civic humanism": that is, the conviction that the progress of society depends on a certain moral force: the "spirit" which, to Montesquieu, must animate the "laws" if history is not to be, as it often is, merely anarchical, "the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind". It was because he believed intensely in civic virtue that he deplored the attitude of the early Christians. When Roman civilisation was in danger, these men contracted out. They refused to serve the state and preferred to sit on pillars in the desert or waste their energies in sterile theological disputes. On the other hand, when the church, or churchmen, showed such a spirit, he would commend them. "Active virtue" was to be respected wherever it was expressed."

"Gibbon was an exact and exacting scholar (hence his disdain for the French philosophes who subordinated scholarship to their philosophy). He read the latest articles, subscribed to the learned journals, cited and criticised his sources. His errors are remarkably few. Of course much has been written on the subject since his time. But his scholarship and his judgement can seldom be faulted."

"Edward Gibbon...is the one irreplaceable English historian. What other 18th-century historian is still read, not only for his style, nor as a contemporary witness of events, but as an interpreter of past ages? Gibbon now seems much less dated than his great successors, Macaulay, Carlyle, Froude; nor can anyone, today, discuss the problem – the permanent problem – of the decline of the Roman Empire except in implicit dialogue with him."

"I have ten thousand apologies to make, for not having long ago returned you my best thanks for the very agreeable present you made me of the three last volumes of your History. I cannot express to you the pleasure it gives me to find, that by the universal assent of every man of taste and learning, whom I either know or correspond with, it sets you at the very head of the whole literary tribe at present existing in Europe."

"He said the facts that made up the volume of narrative were unparalleled in atrociousness, and that nothing equal in criminality was to be traced, either in ancient or modern history, in the correct periods of Tacitus or the luminous page of Gibbon."

"Porson...thought the Decline and Fall beyond all comparison the greatest literary production of the eighteenth century, and was in the habit of repeating long passages from it. Yet I have heard him say that “there could not be a better exercise for a schoolboy than to turn a page of it into English.”"

"Towards the end of the century, in the years 1776–88, a historian, the greatest of the century, as many believe, produced one of the most impressive books ever written on the ancient world – Edward Gibbon (1737–94), The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in six quarto volumes. The range of his reading in Latin and Greek widened and deepened during his years in Lausanne; he also admired Porson and defended him against attacks. Porson in turn wrote a splendid review of Gibbon's work. For Bentley Gibbon found the most appropriate epithet, "tremendous". It is clear, too, from his great work that his qualifications for writing it included an acquaintance with the history of scholarship."

"It is melancholy to say it, but the chief, perhaps the only English writer who has any claim to be considered an ecclesiastical historian, is the infidel Gibbon."

"Another damned thick book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?"

"Is it perhaps Gibbon with his Fall of Rome that so darkens the air of eight hundred years with a squalid dust-storm of demolition as to obscure our sight of the unquenched lights of the mind of man? Ruskin joins day to human day again."

"I picked up Whitaker's criticism on Gibbon. Pointless spite, with here and there a just remark. It would be strange if in so large a work as Gibbon's there were nothing open to just remark. How utterly all the attacks on his History are forgotten! this of Whitaker; Randolph's; Chelsum's; Davies's; that stupid beast Joseph Milner's; even Watson's. And still the book, with all its great faults of substance and style, retains, and will retain, its place in our literature; and this though it is offensive to the religious feeling of the country, and really most unfair where religion is concerned."

"No matter what his weaknesses may be, his “writings will instruct the last generation of mankind.” This remark, which Gibbon made about Tacitus, can, with equal justice, be applied to Gibbon himself."

"The great joy I have had is a long dose of Gibbon, quite incomparable, especially on the Eastern empire. I know no other panorama quite like that. Finlay, I daresay, goes deeper, but he hasn't quite the same magic."

"Gibbon had no followers, founded no school, and his chief bequest to posterity was in fact his style, one of the most distinctive in the English language, whose influence is now and again detectable in the prose of English historians down to the present day."

"[T]he effect of Tacitus, the best historian that Rome produced, can be felt in Gibbon, the best modern historian of Rome... Gibbon realized that Tacitus, sometimes seen as primarily a literary artist, preferring point and drama to the dispassionate search for truth, was a genuinely philosophic historian; and Tacitus showed him how a philosophic history could be not hindered but served by irony, disenchantment, and apophthegmatic wit... In both men this way of speaking brings out the ambiguity of history, the hiddenness of human motive. Influence or coincidence? It is impossible to be sure, but it is fair enough to say that Gibbon has Tacitus in his bones."

"As I ran through your volume of history with great avidity and impatience, I cannot forbear discovering somewhat of the same impatience in returning you thanks for your agreeable present, and expressing the satisfaction which the performance has given me. Whether I consider the dignity of your style, the depth of your matter, or the extensiveness of your learning, I must regard the work as equally the object of esteem."

"The Oxford edition of Gibbon consists of eight volumes with four or five hundred pages in each volume. The exact number of pages is 3,860. The fondest admirers of Gibbon cannot say that it is light reading. Evening after evening goes by, and, if the reader is conscientious, and does not skip, it is a long time before the work is read. Indeed, in these degenerate days I doubt whether there are many persons in the world who can say that they have read their Gibbon right through."

"[I]t is impossible, through reading alone, to interpret the past. Nor is emotion enough. The historian must have a third quality as well: some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius. In Gibbon, as in no other English historian, this tenuous circle was complete. He was a genius who read, dreamed, and also knew — knew, by direct contact, a fragment of the rough stuff of society, and extended his knowledge through the ages."

"Just now I am enthralled by Gibbon's Autobiography. There are passages in it that are more than "correct", and on the border line of beauty. What a giant he is—greatest historian & greatest figure name of the 18th century I say; whether it is his greatness or his remoteness that makes his goings on with religion so queer I do not know."

"The Decline and Fall is a memorial oration. It is, to boot, a sad, stupendous warning to the governing class. Here in the desolation of a thousand years of history lies proof of the destiny of states that depart from the maxims alike of the Roman Republic and of England's Glorious Revolution. Gibbon, soaked in the values of his order, taught its members what they already accepted. His entire history revolves around a formula, around three words, the contents of their social conscience. These words are virtue, wisdom, and power."

"Gibbon's idol Tacitus had been as much moralist as historian. There is a general message in The Decline and Fall, concerned with the worth of freedom and the idealisation of the Roman republic. Furthermore, Gibbon has no doubts about ethical standards of conduct and behaviour, singling out, for instance, the love of pleasure and the love of action as essential components of normal human nature. Some attempts have been made to trace Gibbon's politics specifically through his History, but these have failed to reveal a simple pattern. His instruction has more to do with the principles of human nature and character. If there is any general lesson beyond that, it takes (as L. P. Curtis has observed) the form of a memorial oration to the governing classes on the subject of wisdom, virtue, and power. But Gibbon was too cynical to have had much faith in the effects of instruction, though that did not prevent him from making it part of his historical writing. The experience of past faults, he pointed out, was seldom profitable to the successive generations of mankind."

"I set out upon the eight volumes of Dean Milman's edition of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I was immediately dominated both by the story and the style. All through the long glistening middle hours of the Indian day, from when we quitted stables till the evening shadows proclaimed the hour of Polo, I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all. I scribbled all my opinions on the margins of the pages, and very soon found myself a vehement partisan of the author against the disparagements of his pompous-pious editor. I was not even estranged by his naughty footnotes. On the other hand the Dean's apologies and disclaimers roused my ire. So pleased was I with The Decline and Fall that I began at once to read Gibbon's Autobiography, which luckily was bound up in the same edition. When I read his reference to his old nurse: "If there be any, as I trust there are some, who rejoice that I live, to that dear and excellent woman their gratitude is due," I thought of Mrs. Everest; and it shall be her epitaph."

"It was, of all the books, perhaps the most impressive on me in my then stage of investigation and state of mind. I by no means completely admired Gibbon, perhaps not more than I now do; but his winged sarcasms, so quiet and yet so conclusively transpiercing and killing dead, were often admirable potent and illuminative to me. Nor did I fail to recognise his great power of investigating, ascertaining, grouping, and narrating; though the latter had always, then as now, something of a Drury Lane character, the colours strong but coarse, and set off by lights from the side scenes."

"Oh, one must read Gibbon to get any insight into this wild history of mankind."

"I read Gibbon, and then first clearly saw that Christianity was not true."

"In the Decline and Fall, the civic humanist cycle of corruption, so often repeated in Gibbon's history, was balanced by another and newer theme, the Enlightenment's conception of the development of civilisation, which surrounds the work with an optimism which the story it tells, by itself, could hardly warrant. The notion of the gradual progress of the useful arts, through human industry, is one aspect of that optimism: Gibbon owes a debt, reflected in his footnotes, to Smith's Wealth of Nations. It is true that this version of progress is not heavily stressed; in the Decline and Fall, the most obvious antithesis is still the old one of republican patriotism and barbarian hardihood set against the "indolence", "luxury" and "effeminacy" of supine Asiatics and of once energetic former barbarian conquerors enervated by their own success. Yet there is clearly another possible antithesis to indolence and luxury: industry and a permissible (if still dangerous) civilised opulence."

"I don't know but you have spoken too highly of Gibbon's book; the Dean of Derry, who is our Club as well as Gibbon, talks of answering it. I think it is right that as fast as infidel wasps or venomous insects, whether creeping or flying, are hatched, they should be crushed. [...] He is an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow, and poisons our literary Club to me."

"In the pages of the Decline and Fall, we seem to be taking a long journey, but all the time we remain in one place: we sit with Gibbon in the ruins of the Capitol. It is from the ruins of the Capitol that we perceive, as from a great distance, a thousand years filled with dim shapes of men moving blindly, performing strangely, in an unreal shadowy world. We do not enter the Middle Ages, or relive a span of human experience: still we sit in the ruins of the Capitol, becoming cramped and half numb listening, all this long stationary time, to our unwearied guide as he narrates for us, in a melancholy and falling cadence, the disaster that mankind has suffered, the defeat inflicted by the forces of evil on the human spirit. The Decline and Fall is a history, yes; but something more than a history, a memorial oration: Gibbon is commemorating the death of ancient civilization; he has described, for the “instruction of future ages,” the “triumph of barbarism and religion.”"