e of this verdict will scarcely be
contested. No other history of that century has been so often reprinted,
annotated, and discussed, or remains to the present day a capital
authority on the great period of which it treats. As a composition it
stands unchallenged and conspicuous among the masterpieces of English
literature, while as a history it covers a space of more than twelve
hundred years, including some of the most momentous events in the annals
of mankind.

Gibbon was born at Putney, Surrey, April 27th, 1737. Though his father
was a member of Parliament and the owner of a moderate competence, the
author of this great work was essentially a self-educated man. Weak
health and almost constant illness in early boyhood broke up his school
life,--which appears to have been fitfully and most imperfectly
conducted,--withdrew him from boyish games, but also gave him, as it has
given to many other shy and sedentary boys, an early and inveterate
passion for reading. His reading, however, was very unlike that of an
ordinary boy. He has given a graphic picture of the ardor with which,
when he was only fourteen, he flung himself into serious but unguided
study; which was at first purely desultory, but gradually contracted
into historic lines, and soon concentrated itself mainly on that
Oriental history which he was one day so brilliantly to illuminate.
"Before I was sixteen," he says, "I had exhausted all that could be
learned in English of the Arabs and Persians, the Tartars and Turks; and
the same ardor led me to guess at the French of D'Herbelot, and to
construe the barbarous Latin of Pocock's 'Abulfaragius.'"

His health however gradually improved, and when he entered Magdalen
College, Oxford, it might have been expected that a new period of
intellectual development would have begun; but Oxford had at this time
sunk to the lowest depth of stagnation, and to Gibbon it proved
extremely uncongenial. He complained that he found no guidance, no
stimulus, and no discipline, and that the fourteen months he spent
there were the most idle and unprofitable of his life. They were very
unexpectedly cut short by his conversion to the Roman Catholic faith,
which he formally adopted at the age of sixteen.

This conversion is, on the whole, the most surprising incident of his
calm and uneventful life. The tendencies of the time, both in England
and on the Continent, were in a wholly different direction. The more
spiritual and emotional