an intimate Swiss friend, gave
the reason why he had embraced it. "I entered Parliament," he said,
"without patriotism, and without ambition, and I had no other aim than
to secure the comfortable and honest place of a _Lord of Trade_. I
obtained this place at last. I held it for three years, from 1779 to
1782, and the net annual product of it, being L750 sterling, increased
my revenue to the level of my wants and desires."[58] His retirement
from Parliament was followed by ten years' residence at Lausanne, in the
first four of which he completed his history. A year and a half after
his removal to Lausanne, he referred, in a letter to his closest friend,
Lord Sheffield, to the "abyss of your cursed politics," and added: "I
never was a very warm patriot and I grow every day a citizen of the
world. The scramble for power and profit at Westminster or St. James's,
and the names of Pitt and Fox become less interesting to me than those
of Caesar and Pompey."[59]

These expressions would seem to indicate that Gibbon might have written
contemporary history well and that the candor displayed in "The Decline
and Fall" might not have been lacking had he written of England in his
own time. But that subject he never contemplated. When twenty-four years
old he had however considered a number of English periods and finally
fixed upon Sir Walter Raleigh for his hero; but a year later, he wrote
in his journal: "I shrink with terror from the modern history of
England, where every character is a problem, and every reader a friend
or an enemy; where a writer is supposed to hoist a flag of party and is
devoted to damnation by the adverse faction.... I must embrace a safer
and more extensive theme."[60]

How well Gibbon knew himself! Despite his coolness and candor, war and
revolution revealed his strong Tory prejudices, which he undoubtedly
feared might color any history of England that he might undertake. "I
took my seat," in the House of Commons, he wrote, "at the beginning of
the memorable contest between Great Britain and America; and supported
with many a sincere and _silent_ vote the rights though perhaps not the
interests of the mother country."[61] In 1782 he recorded the
conclusion: "The American war had once been the favorite of the country,
the pride of England was irritated by the resistance of her colonies,
and the executive power was driven by national clamor into the most
vigorous and coercive measures." But it was a fruitles