I wonder if there is any picture extant of Gibbon in the character of subaltern in the South Hampshire Militia?  With his small frame, his huge head, his round, chubby face, and the pretentious uniform, he must have looked a most extraordinary figure.  Never was there so round a peg in a square hole!  His father, a man of a very different type, held a commission, and this led to poor Gibbon becoming a soldier in spite of himself.  War had broken out, the regiment was mustered, and the unfortunate student, to his own utter dismay, was kept under arms until the conclusion of hostilities.  For three years he was divorced from his books, and loudly and bitterly did he resent it.  The South Hampshire Militia never saw the enemy, which is perhaps as well for them.  Even Gibbon himself pokes fun at them; but after three years under canvas it is probable that his men had more cause to smile at their book-worm captain than he at his men.  His hand closed much more readily on a pen-handle than on a sword-hilt.  In his lament, one of the items is that his colonel’s example encouraged the daily practice of hard and even excessive drinking, which gave him the gout.  “The loss of so many busy and idle hours were not compensated for by any elegant pleasure,” says he; “and my temper was insensibly soured by the society of rustic officers, who were alike deficient in the knowledge of scholars and the manners of gentlemen.”  The picture of Gibbon flushed with wine at the mess-table, with these hard-drinking squires around him, must certainly have been a curious one.  He admits, however, that he found consolations as well as hardships in his spell of soldiering.  It made him an Englishman once more, it improved his health, it changed the current of his thoughts.  It was even useful to him as an historian.  In a celebrated and characteristic sentence, he says, “The discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the Phalanx and the Legions, and the captain of the Hampshire Grenadiers has not been useless to the historian of the Roman Empire.”

If we don’t know all about Gibbon it is not his fault, for he wrote no fewer than six accounts of his own career, each differing from the other, and all equally bad.  A man must have more heart and soul than Gibbon to write a good autobiography.  It is the most difficult of all human compositions, calling for a mixture of tact, discretion, and frankness which make an almost impossible blend.  Gibbon, in spite of his foreign education, was a very typical Englishman in many ways, with the reticence, self-respect, and self-consciousness of the race.  No British autobiography has ever been frank, and consequently no British autobiography has ever been good.  Trollope’s, perhaps, is as good as any that I know, but of all forms of literature it is the one least adapted to the national genius.  You could not imagine a British Rousseau, still less a British Benvenuto Cellini.  In one way it is to the credit of the race that it should be so.  If we do as much evil as our neighbours we at least have grace enough to be ashamed of it and to suppress its publication.