Demosthenes or a tragedy of Sophocles.' It will never return, because it never existed. Pericles (who died in the fourth year of the LXXXIXth Olympiad. ant. Ch. 429, Dio. Sic. 1. xii. 46) was confessedly the patron of Phidias, and the contemporary of Sophocles; but he could enjoy no very great pleasure in the conversation of Plato, who was born the same year that he himself died (Diogenes Laertius in Platone, v. Stanley's History of Philosophy, p. 154). The error is still more extraordinary with regard to Apelles and Demosthenes, since both the painter and the orator survived Alexander the Great, whose death is above a century posterior to that of Pericles (in 323). And indeed, though Athens was the seat of every liberal art from the days of Themistocles to those of Demetrius Phalereus, yet no particular era will afford Mr. Warton the complete synchronism he seems to wish for; as tragedy was deprived of her famous triumvirate before the arts of philosophy and eloquence had attained the perfection which they soon after received from the hands of Plato, Aristotle, and Demosthenes."

And wonderful is it for what Mr. Hallam calls "the languid students of our present age" to turn over the journal of his daily studies. It is true, it seems to have been revised by himself; and so great a narrator would group facts nicely with which he was so familiar; but allowing any discount (if we may use such a mean word about a noble being) for the skilful art of the impressive historian, there will yet remain in the Extraits de mon Journal a wonderful monument of learned industry. You may open any where. "Dissertation on the Medal of Smyrna, by M. de Boze replete with erudition and taste; containing curious researches on the pre-eminence of the cities of Asia.-Researches on the Polypus, by Mr. Trembley. A new world: throwing light on physics, but darkening metaphysics.-Vegetius's Institutions. This writer on tactics has good general notions; but his particular account of the Roman discipline is deformed by confusion and anachronisms." Or, "I this day began a very considerable task, which was, to read Cluverius' Italia Antiqua in two volumes folio, Leyden 1624, Elzevirs;" and it appears he did read it as well as begin it, which is the point where most enterprising men would have failed. From the time of his residence at Lausanne his Latin scholarship had been sound and good; and the best part of his studies was directed to the illustration of the best Roman authors; but it is curious to find on the 16th of August 1761, after his return to England, and when he was twenty-four years old, the following extract: "I have at last finished the Iliad. As I undertook it to improve myself in the Greek language, which I had totally neglected for some years past, and to which I never applied myself with a

proper attention, I must give a reason why I began with Homer, and that contrary to Le Clerc's advice. I had two: 1st, As Homer is the most ancient Greek author (excepting perhaps Hesiod) who is now extant; and as he was not only the poet, but the lawgiver, the theologian, the historian, and the philosopher, of the ancients, every succeeding writer is full of quotations from, or allusions to, his writings, which it would be difficult to understand without a previous knowledge of them. In this situation, was it not natural to follow the ancients themselves, who always began their studies by the perusal of Homer? 2dly, No writer ever treated such a variety of subjects. As every part of civil, military, or economical life is introduced into his poems, and as the simplicity of his age allowed him to call every thing by its proper name, almost the whole compass of the Greek tongue is comprised in Homer. I have so far met with the success I hoped for, that I have acquired a great facility in reading the language, and treasured up a very great stock of words. What I have rather neglected is, the grammatical construction of them, and especially the many various inflexions of the verbs. In order to acquire that dry but necessary branch of knowledge, I propose bestowing some time every morning on the perusal of the Greek Grammar of Port Royal, as one of the best extant. I believe that I read nearly one-half of Homer like a mere schoolboy, not enough master of the words to elevate myself to the poetry. The remainder I read with a good deal of care and criticism, and made many observations on them. Some I have inserted here; for the rest I shall find a proper place. Upon the whole, I think that Homer's few faults (for some he certainly has) are lost in the variety of his beauties. I expected to have finished him long before. The delay was owing partly to the circumstances of my way of life and avocations, and partly to my own fault; for while every one looks on me as a prodigy of application, I know myself how strong a propensity I have to indolence." Posterity will confirm the contemporary theory that he was a "prodigy" of steady study. Those who know what the Greek language is, how much of the Decline and Fall depends on Greek authorities, how few errors the keen criticism of divines and scholars has been able to detect in his use of them, will be best able to appreciate the patient every-day labour which could alone repair the early neglect of so difficult an attainment.

It is odd how little Gibbon wrote, at least for the public, in early life. More than twenty-two years elapsed from his first return from Lausanne to the appearance of the first volume of his great work, and in that long interval his only important publication, if it can indeed be so called, was a French essay,

Sur l'Etude de la Littérature, which contains some sensible remarks, and shows much regular reading; but which is on the whole a "conceivable treatise," and would be wholly forgotten if it had been written by any one else. It was little read in England, and must have been a serious difficulty to his friends in the militia; but the Parisians read it, or said they had read it, which is more in their way, and the fame of being a French author was a great aid to him in foreign society. It flattered, indeed, the French literati more than any one can now fancy. The French had then the idea that it was uncivilised to speak any other language, and the notion of writing any other seemed quite a bêtise. By a miserable misfortune you might not know French, but at least you could conceal it assiduously; white paper any how might go unsoiled; posterity at least should not hear of such ignorance. The Parisian was to be the universal tongue. And it did not seem absurd, especially to those only slightly acquainted with foreign countries at all, that they might be in part successful. Political eminence had given their language a diplomatic supremacy. There was no German literature at all; Italy had ceased to produce important books. There was only England left to dispute the literary despotism; and such an attempt as Gibbon's was a peculiarly acceptable flattery, for it seemed as if her most cultivated men were beginning to abandon their own tongue, and to write like other nations in the cosmopolitan lingua franca. A few far-seeing observers, however, even then contemplated the train of events which at the present day give such a preponderating influence to our own writers, and make it an arduous matter even to explain the conceivableness of the French ambition. Of all men living then or since, David Hume was the most likely from prejudice and habit to take an unfavourable view of English literary influence; he had more literary fame than he deserved in France and less in England; yet his cold and discriminating intellect at once emancipated him from the sophistries which imposed on those less watchful. He wrote to Gibbon, "I have only one objection, derived from the language in which it is written. Why do you compose in French, and carry faggots into the wood, as Horace says with regard to Romans who wrote in Greek? I grant that you have a like motive to those Romans, and adopt a language much more generally diffused than your native tongue; but have you not remarked the fate of those two ancient languages in the following ages? The Latin, though then less celebrated and confined to more narrow limits, has in some measure outlived the Greek, and is now more generally understood by men of letters. Let the French, therefore, triumph in the present diffusion of their tongue. Our solid and increasing establishments in Ame

rica, where we need less dread the inundation of barbarians, promise a superior stability and duration to the English language." The cool sceptic was correct. The great breeding people have gone out and multiplied; colonies in every clime attest our success; French is the patois of Europe; English is the language of the world.

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Gibbon took the advice of his remarkable friend, and prepared himself for the composition of his great work in English. His studies were destined, however, to undergo an interruption. Yesterday morning," he wrote to a friend, "about half an hour after seven, as I was destroying an army of barbarians, I heard a double rap at the door, and my friend Mr. Eliot was soon introduced. After some idle conversation, he told me that if I was desirous of being in parliament, he had an independent seat very much at my service.' The borough was Liskeard; and the epithet independent is, of course, ironical, Mr. Eliot being himself the constituency of that place. The offer was accepted, and one of the most learned of members of parliament took his seat.

The political life of Gibbon is briefly described. He was a supporter of Lord North. That well-known statesman was, in the most exact sense, a representative man,-although representative of the very class of persons most out of favour with the transcendental thinkers, who invented that name. Germans deny it, but it is true that in every country common opinions are very common. In all lands, both now and of old, there exists the easy and comfortable mass; quiet, sagacious, short-sighted,—such as the Jews whom Rabshakeh tempted by their vine and their fig-tree, such as the English with their snug dining-room and after-dinner nap, domestic happiness and Bullo coal; sensible, solid, practical men, without stretching irritable reason, but with a placid supine instinct; without originality and without folly; judicious in their dealings, respected in the world; wanting little, sacrificing nothing; good-tempered people in a word, "caring for nothing until they are themselves hurt." Lord North was of this class. You could hardly make him angry. "No doubt," tapping his fat sides, "I am that odious thing a minister; and I believe other people wish they were so too." Profound people look deeply for the maxims of his policy; and it being on the surface, of course they fail to find it. He did not what the mind but what the body of the community wanted to have done; he appealed to the real people, the large English commonplace herd. His abilities were great; and with them he did what people with no abilities wished to do, and could not do. Lord Brougham has just published his Letters to the King, showing that which partial extracts had made known before, that he was quite opposed to the war he was carrying on; was convinced it could

not succeed; hardly, in fact, wished it might. Why did he carry it on? Vox populi, the voice of the well-dressed wigs, commanded it to be done; and he cheerfully sacrificed American people, who were nothing to him, to English, who were something, and a king, who was much. Gibbon was the very man to support such a ruler. His historical writings have given him a posthumous eminence; but in his own time he was doubtless thought a sensible safe man, of ordinary thoughts and intelligible actions. To do him justice, he did not pretend to be a hero. "You know," he wrote to his friend Deyverdun, “que je suis entré au parliament sans patriotisme, sans ambition, et que toutes mes vues se bornoient à la place commode et honnête d'un lord of trade." Wise in his generation was written on his brow. He quietly and gently supported the policy of his time.

Even, however, amid the fatigue of parliamentary attendance, -the fatigue, in fact, of attending a nocturnal and oratorical club, where you met the best people, who could not speak, as well as a few of the worst, who always would,-Gibbon's history made much progress. The first volume, a quarto, one-sixth of the whole, was published in the spring of 1776, and at once raised his fame to a high point. Ladies actually read it-read about Boetica and Tarraconensis, the Roman legions and the tribunitian powers. Grave scholars wrote dreary commendations. "The first impression," he writes, "was exhausted in a few days; a second and third edition were scarcely adequate to the demand; and my bookseller's property was twice invaded by the pirates of Dublin. My book was on every table"-tables must have been rather few in that age "and almost on every toilette; the historian was crowned by the taste or fashion of the day; nor was the general voice disturbed by the barking of any profound critic." noise penetrated deep into the unlearned classes. Mr. Sheridan, who never read any thing" on principle," said that the crimes of Warren Hastings surpassed any thing to be found in the "correct sentences of Tacitus or the luminous page of Gibbon." Some one seems to have been struck with the jet of learning, and questioned the great wit. "I said," he replied, voluminous."

The

History, it is said, is of no use; at least a great critic, who is understood to have in the press a very elaborate work in that kind, not long since seemed to allege that writings of this sort did not establish a theory of the universe, and were therefore of no avail. But whatever may be the use of this sort of composition in itself and abstractedly, it is certainly of great use relatively and to literary men. Consider the position of a person of that species. He sits beside a library-fire, with nice white paper,