father died; he came into a fortune, entered Parliament, where he sat for eight years, but never spoke; and, in 1776, he began his history of the +Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire+. This, by far the greatest of his works, was not completed till 1787, and was published in 1788, on his fifty-first birthday. His account of the completion of the work-- it was finished at Lausanne, where he had lived for six years-- is full of beauty: “It was on the day, or rather night, of June 27, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page in a summer-house in my garden. After laying down my pen, I took several turns in a covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene. The silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. I will not describe the first emotion of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that, whatever might be the future fate of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.” Gibbon died in 1794, about one year before the birth of another great historian, Grote, the author of the ‘History of Greece.’ 9. Gibbon’s book is one of the great historical works of the world. It covers a space of about thirteen centuries, from the reign of Trajan (98), to the fall of the Eastern Empire in 1453; and the amount of reading and study required to write it, must have been almost beyond the power of our conceiving. The skill in arranging and disposing the enormous mass of matter in his history is also unparalleled. His style is said by a critic to be “copious, splendid, elegantly rounded, distinguished by supreme artificial skill.” It is remarkable for the proportion of Latin words employed. While some parts of our translation of the Bible contain as much as 96 per cent of pure English words, Gibbon has only 58 per cent: the rest, or 42 per cent, are words of Latin origin. In fact, of all our great English writers, Gibbon stands lowest in his use of pure English words; and the two writers who come nearest him in this respect are Johnson and Swift. The great Greek scholar, Professor Porson, said of Gibbon’s style, that “there could not be a better exercise for a schoolboy than to turn a page of it into English.”