"
This is a splendid and world-famous passage well worth committing to
memory.
Your loving old
G.P.
13
MY DEAR ANTONY,
Edward Gibbon, who wrote the _Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire_, belonged to the later half of the eighteenth century, and was
a contemporary of Dr. Johnson and Burke. He finished his great history
three years after Dr. Johnson's death. It is a monumental work, and
will live as long as the English language. It is one of the books which
every cultivated gentleman should read. The style is stately and
sonorous, and the industry and erudition involved in its production must
have been immense.
Although it never sinks below a noble elevation of style, it nevertheless
displays no uplifting flights of eloquence or declamation, and to me, and
probably to you, Antony, the most moving passages in Gibbon's
writings are those that describe with unaffected emotion the moment of
the first resolve to compose the great history and the night when he
wrote the last line of it. On page 129 of his memoirs[1] he wrote:--
"It was at Rome on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing
amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed fryars were
singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing
the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.
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