North was quite opposed to the war he was carrying on; was convinced it could not succeed; hardly, in fact, wished it might. Why did he carry it on? _Vox populi_, the voice of well-dressed men commanded it to be done; and he cheerfully sacrificed American people, who were nothing to him, to English, who were something, and a king, who was much. Gibbon was the very man to support such a ruler. His historical writings have given him a posthumous eminence; but in his own time he was doubtless thought a sensible safe man, of ordinary thoughts and intelligible actions. To do him justice, he did not pretend to be a hero. ‘You know,’ he wrote to his friend Deyverdun, ‘_que je suis entré au parlement sans patriotisme, sans ambition, et que toutes mes vues se bornoient à la place commode et honnête d’un_ lord of trade.’ ‘Wise in his generation’ was written on his brow. He quietly and gently supported the policy of his time. Even, however, amid the fatigue of parliamentary attendance,—the fatigue, in fact, of attending a nocturnal and oratorical club, where you met the best people, who could not speak, as well as a few of the worst, who _would_,—Gibbon’s history made much progress. The first volume, a quarto, one-sixth of the whole, was published in the spring of 1776, and at once raised his fame to a high point. Ladies actually read it—read about Bœtica and Tarraconensis, the Roman legions and the tribunitian powers. Grave scholars wrote dreary commendations. ‘The first impression,’ he writes, ‘was exhausted in a few days; a second and a third edition were scarcely adequate to the demand; and my bookseller’s property was twice invaded by the pirates of Dublin. My book was on every table’—tables must have been rather few in that age—‘and almost on every toilette; the historian was crowned by the taste or fashion of the day; nor was the general voice disturbed by the barking of any profound critic.’ The noise penetrated deep into the unlearned classes. Mr. Sheridan, who never read anything ‘on principle,’ said that the crimes of Warren Hastings surpassed anything to be found in the ‘correct sentences of Tacitus or the _luminous_ page of Gibbon.’ Some one seems to have been struck with the jet of learning, and questioned the great wit. ‘I said,’ he replied, ‘_vo_luminous.’