Fourth (and perhaps most significant of the man and his work), Burke takes his stand squarely upon the principle of justice.  He has studied history, and he finds that to establish justice, between man and man and between nation and nation, has been the supreme object of every reformer since the world began.  No small or merely temporary success attracts him; only the truth will suffice for an argument; and nothing less than justice will ever settle a question permanently.  Such is his platform, simple as the Golden Rule, unshakable as the moral law.  Hence, though he apparently fails of his immediate desire in each of these three orations, the principle for which he contends cannot fail.  As a modern writer says of Lincoln, “The full, rich flood of his life through the nation’s pulse is yet beating”; and his words are still potent in shaping the course of English politics in the way of justice.

EDWARD GIBBON (1737-1794)

To understand Burke or Johnson, one must read a multitude of books and be wary in his judgment; but with Gibbon the task is comparatively easy, for one has only to consider two books, his Memoirs and the first volume of his History, to understand the author.  In his Memoirs we have an interesting reflection of Gibbon’s own personality,—­a man who looks with satisfaction on the material side of things, who seeks always the easiest path for himself, and avoids life’s difficulties and responsibilities.  “I sighed as a lover; but I obeyed as a son,” he says, when, to save his inheritance, he gave up the woman he loved and came home to enjoy the paternal loaves and fishes.  That is suggestive of the man’s whole life.  His History, on the other hand, is a remarkable work.  It was the first in our language to be written on scientific principles, and with a solid basis of fact; and the style is the very climax of that classicism which had ruled England for an entire century.  Its combination of historical fact and literary style makes The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire the one thing of Gibbon’s life that is “worthy to be remembered.”

GIBBON’S HISTORY.  For many years Gibbon had meditated, like Milton, upon an immortal work, and had tried several historical subjects, only to give them up idly.  In his Journal he tells us how his vague resolutions were brought to a focus: 

It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.