them with his pen, when he drew up, at the request of Lords Thurlow
and Weymouth, his _Memoire Justificatif_, in French, in which "he
vindicated against the French manifesto the justice of the British
arms." It was a service worthy of a small fee, which no doubt he
received. He had to wait till 1779, when he had been five years in
Parliament, before his cousin Mr. Eliot, and his friend Wedderburne,
the Attorney-General, were able to find him a post as one of the Lords
Commissioners of Trade and Plantations. The Board of Trade, of which
he became one of the eight members, survives in mortal memory only
from being embalmed in the bright amber of one of Burke's great
speeches. "This board, Sir, has had both its original formation and
its regeneration in a job. In a job it was conceived, and in a job its
mother brought it forth.... This board is a sort of temperate bed of
influence: a sort of gently ripening hothouse, where eight members of
Parliament receive salaries of a thousand a year for a certain given
time, in order to mature at a proper season a claim to two thousand,
granted for doing less" (_Speech on Economical Reform_). Gibbon, with
entire good humour, acknowledges the justice of Burke's indictment,
and says he was "heard with delight, even by those whose existence he
proscribed." After all, he only enjoyed the emolument of his office
for three years, and he places that emolument at a lower figure than
Burke did. He could not have received more than between two and three
thousand pounds of public money; and when we consider what manner of
men have fattened on the national purse, it would be churlish to
grudge that small sum to the historian of the _Decline and Fall_. The
misfortune is that, reasonably or otherwise, doubts were raised as to
Gibbon's complete straightforwardness and honourable adhesion to party
ties in accepting office. He says himself: "My acceptance of a place
provoked some of the leaders of opposition with whom I had lived in
habits of intimacy, and I was most unjustly accused of deserting a
party in which I had never enlisted." There is certainly no evidence
that those who were most qualified to speak, those who gave him the
place and reckoned on his vote, ever complained of want of allegiance.
On the other hand, Gibbon's own letter to Edward Elliot, accepting the
place, betrays a somewhat uneasy conscience. He owns that he was far
from approving all the past measures of the administration, ev