I should think that few men have been born with the material for self-sufficient contentment more completely within himself than Edward Gibbon.  He had every gift which a great scholar should have, an insatiable thirst for learning in every form, immense industry, a retentive memory, and that broadly philosophic temperament which enables a man to rise above the partisan and to become the impartial critic of human affairs.  It is true that at the time he was looked upon as bitterly prejudiced in the matter of religious thought, but his views are familiar to modern philosophy, and would shock no susceptibilities in these more liberal (and more virtuous) days.  Turn him up in that Encyclopedia, and see what the latest word is upon his contentions.  “Upon the famous fifteenth and sixteenth chapters it is not necessary to dwell,” says the biographer, “because at this time of day no Christian apologist dreams of denying the substantial truth of any of the more important allegations of Gibbon.  Christians may complain of the suppression of some circumstances which might influence the general result, and they must remonstrate against the unfair construction of their case.  But they no longer refuse to hear any reasonable evidence tending to show that persecution was less severe than had been once believed, and they have slowly learned that they can afford to concede the validity of all the secondary causes assigned by Gibbon and even of others still more discreditable.  The fact is, as the historian has again and again admitted, that his account of the secondary causes which contributed to the progress and establishment of Christianity leaves the question as to the natural or supernatural origin of Christianity practically untouched.”  This is all very well, but in that case how about the century of abuse which has been showered upon the historian?  Some posthumous apology would seem to be called for.

Physically, Gibbon was as small as Johnson was large, but there was a curious affinity in their bodily ailments.  Johnson, as a youth, was ulcerated and tortured by the king’s evil, in spite of the Royal touch.  Gibbon gives us a concise but lurid account of his own boyhood.

“I was successively afflicted by lethargies and fevers, by opposite tendencies to a consumptive and dropsical habit, by a contraction of my nerves, a fistula in my eye, and the bite of a dog, most vehemently suspected of madness.  Every practitioner was called to my aid, the fees of the doctors were swelled by the bills of the apothecaries and surgeons.  There was a time when I swallowed more physic than food, and my body is still marked by the indelible scars of lancets, issues, and caustics.”

Such is his melancholy report.  The fact is that the England of that day seems to have been very full of that hereditary form of chronic ill-health which we call by the general name of struma.  How far the hard-drinking habits in vogue for a century or so before had anything to do with it I cannot say, nor can I trace a connection between struma and learning; but one has only to compare this account of Gibbon with Johnson’s nervous twitches, his scarred face and his St. Vitus’ dance, to realize that these, the two most solid English writers of their generation, were each heir to the same gruesome inheritance.