EDWARD GIBBON, the historian of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was born at Putney on the 27th of April, 1737, and was the first child of Edward Gibbon and Judith Porten, and the only one of seven children that survived infancy. He spent a sickly childhood in occasional lessons, and desultory reading and discussion with his mother's sister, a lady of a srtong understanding and a warm heart, whom he calls "the mother of his mind," and to whose kindness he ascribes not only the bringing out of his intellectual faculties, but the preservation of his life in these "critical early years. One of his temporary masters, was the Rev. Philip Francis, the translator of Horace. His father had him entered at Magdalen College, Oxford, at the age of 15. Here he became a convert to the Church of Rome, and found himself shut out of Oxford. To effect his cure from Catholicism, he was sent to Lausanne, in Switzerland, to board in the house of M. Pavillard, a Calvinist minister, a poor, but sensible and intelligent man, who judiciously suggested books and arguments to his young charge and had the satisfaction of seeing him reconverted to Protestantism, in witness of which conversion he received the sacrament in the church of Lausanne on Christmas Day, 1754, his belief in the Roman Church having lasted not quite 18 months. He lived nearly five years in this house, and it was here that he began and carried out steadily and joyously those private studies, which, aided by his enormous memory, made him master of erudition without a superior, and with hardly an equal. After his return to England and his father's house, he persevered in these studies as best he could.
He entered parliament for the borough of Liskeard at the beginning of the struggle with America. He sat eight years, but never had the courage to speak; "the great speakers filled him with despair, the poor ones with terror." In 1776, the first volume of The Decline and Fall was published, and its success was prodigious. The reputation of the author was established before the religious world had had time to consider and attack the last chapters of the work - the 15th and 16th - in which, while admitting, or at least not denying the "convincing evidence of the doctrine itself, and the ruling providence of its great author," he proceeds to account for the rapid growth of the early Christian church, by "secondary," or human causes. He finished this great work on the 27th of June 1787, at Lausanne, to which he had retired for quiet and economy, after leaving parliament, and holding office under government for a short time. He died on the 16th of January, 1794, in St. James Street, London.
It is not easy to characterize a man of so gigantic and cultivated an intellect in few or many phases. He was a faithful friend, pleasant and hardly rivalled in conversation, not disliked by any who came near him. His Decline and Fall is probably the greatest achievement of human thought and erudition in the department of history. It is virtually a history of the civilized world for thirteen centuries, during which paganism was breaking down and Christianity was superseding it: and thus bridges over the chasm between the old world and the new.