journalistic Gamps try to frighten Betsy Prig.  Of course an obvious objection to my assertion is the truism that everything has a life; and that towards the end of that natural life we are correct in speaking of approaching decay.  With physical phenomena, however, I am not dealing, though I may say, by the way, that there are many examples of human intellect maturing in middle life or extreme old age.  William Blake’s masterpiece, the illustrations to the Book of Job, were executed when he was sixty-eight, a few years before his death.  The late Lord Kelvin is an example of an unimpaired intellect.  Still, it must be admitted that while nations may be destroyed by conquest, or by conquering too much and becoming absorbed by the conquered, and that ancient buildings may be pulled down or restored, so, too, conventions in literature and schools of art have been brought to an end by war, plague, or death—­ostensibly brought to an end.  But it is an error to suppose that art or literature, because their development was artificially arrested, were in a state of decay.

The favourite object-lesson of our childhood was the Roman Empire.  ‘Here’s richness,’ as Mr. Squeers said, here was decline, and Gibbon wrote his prose epic from that point of view.  I hardly dare to differ with the greatest of English historians, but if we approach his work in the scientific spirit with which we should always regard history, we shall find that Gibbon draws false deductions from the undisputed facts, the unchallenged assertions of his history.  Commencing with the Roman Empire almost in its cradle, he sees in every twist of the infant limbs prognostications of premature decline in a dispensation which by his own computation lasted over fourteen hundred years.  It is safe enough to prophesy about the past.  Everything I admit has a life, but I do not consider old age decay any more than I think exuberant youth immature childhood; death may be only arrested development and life itself an exhausted convention.  Have you ever tried to count the number of reasons Gibbon gives (each one is a principal reason) for the cause of Roman decline?  His philosophy reminds me of Flaubert’s hero, who observed that if Napoleon had been content to remain a simple soldier in the barracks at Marseilles, he might still be on the throne of France.  If we really accept Gibbon’s view of history, I am not surprised that any one should be nervous about the British Empire.  The great intellectual idea of the Roman dominion, arrested indeed by barbarian invasion, philosophically never decayed.  Some of it was embalmed in Byzantium—­particularly its artistic and literary sides; its religious forces were absorbed by the Roman Church, as Hobbes pointed out in a very wonderful passage; its humanism and polity became the common property of the European nations of to-day.  Gibbon’s work should have been called ’The Rise and Progress of Greco-Roman Civilisation.’  That is not such a good