" (Quoted in Croker's _Boswell_.)
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 9: Not the assembly-room of that name, but a gaming-club
where the play was high. I find no evidence that Gibbon ever yielded
to the prevalent passion for gambling.]
Now and then he even joins in a masquerade, "the finest thing ever
seen," which costs two thousand guineas. But the chief charm of it to
him seems to have been the pleasure that it gave to his Aunt Porten.
These little vanities are however quite superficial, and are never
allowed to interfere with work.
Now indeed he was no loiterer. In three years after his settlement in
London he had produced the first volume of the _Decline and Fall_: an
amount of diligence which will not be underrated by those who
appreciate the vast difference between commencing and continuing an
undertaking of that magnitude. "At the outset," he says, "all was dark
and doubtful; even the title of the work, the true aera of the decline
and fall of the empire, the limits of the Introduction, the division
of the chapters, and the order of the narrative,--and I was often
tempted to cast away the labour of seven years;"--alternations no
doubt of hope and despair familiar to every sincere and competent
student.
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