t aside
without regret, and it requires an effort to take it up again."
Another of Walpole's correspondents, the Countess of Ossory, seems to
have made similar strictures. If we admit that women are less capable
than masculine scholars of doing justice to the strong side of Gibbon,
we may also acknowledge that they are better fitted than men to
appreciate and to be shocked by his defective side, which is a
prevailing want of moral elevation and nobility of sentiment. His
cheek rarely flushes in enthusiasm for a good cause. The tragedy of
human life never seems to touch him, no glimpse of the infinite ever
calms and raises the reader of his pages. Like nearly all the men of
his day, he was of the earth earthy, and it is impossible to get over
the fact.

CHAPTER X.

LAST ILLNESS.--DEATH.--CONCLUSION.

Gibbon had now only about six months to live. He did not seem to have
suffered by his rapid journey from Lausanne to London. During the
summer which he spent with his friend Lord Sheffield, he was much as
usual; only his friend noticed that his habitual dislike to motion
appeared to increase, and he was so incapable of exercise that he was
confined to the library and dining-room. "Then he joined Mr. F. North
in pleasant arguments against exercise in general. He ridiculed the
unsettled and restless disposition that summer, the most uncomfortable
of all seasons, as he said, generally gives to those who have the use
of their limbs." The true disciples of Epicurus are not always the
least stout and stoical in the presence of irreparable evils.

After spending three or four months at Sheffield Place, he went to
Bath to visit his step-mother, Mrs. Gibbon. His conduct to her through
life was highly honourable to him. It should be remembered that her
jointure, paid out of his father's decayed estate, was a great tax on
his small income. In his efforts to improve his position by selling
his landed property, Mrs. Gibbon seems to have been at times somewhat
difficult to satisfy as regards the security of her interests. It was
only prudent on her part. But it is easy to see what a source of
alienation and quarrel was here ready prepared, if both parties had
not risen superior to sordid motives. There never seems to have been
the smallest cloud between them. When one of his properties was sold
he writes: "Mrs. Gibbon's jointure is secured on the Buriton estate,
and her legal consent is requisite for the sale. Again and again