One does not wonder
that they did not see ahead of them--men never do. One does rather
wonder that they did not see what was before their eyes. But wonder is
useless and a mistake. People who have never seen a volcano cannot be
expected to fear the burning lava, or even to see that a volcano
differs from any other mountain.
Gibbon had brought good introductions from London, but he admits that
they were useless, or rather superfluous. His nationality and his
_Essai_ were his best recommendations. It was the day of Anglomania,
and, as he says, "every Englishman was supposed to be a patriot and a
philosopher." "I had rather be," said Mdlle. de Lespinasse to Lord
Shelburne, "the least member of the House of Commons than even the
King of Prussia." Similar things must have been said to Gibbon, but he
has not recorded them; and generally it may be said that he is
disappointingly dull and indifferent to Paris, though he liked it well
enough when there. He never caught the Paris fever as Hume did, and
Sterne, or even as Walpole did, for all the hard things he says of the
underbred and overbearing manners of the philosophers.
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