and the hundreds more who pass so vividly before us, are all dead these centuries. If this little paper shall send some to the reading of this most extraordinary book, I shall be more than satisfied. The only edition which is worth while is Wheatley’s, in ten volumes, with portraits and a volume of _Pepysiana_. The smaller editions are apt to transmute Pepys into an ordinary humdrum and industrious civil servant. Edward Gibbon For many years it has been taught--I have taught it myself to generations of students--that Gibbon’s hydrocele surpassed in greatness all other hydroceles, that it contained twelve pints of fluid, and that it was, in short, one of those monstrous things which exist mainly in romance; one of those chimeras which grow in the minds of the half-informed and of those who wish to be deceived. For a brief moment this chimera looms its huge bulk over serious history; it is pricked; it disappears for ever, carrying with it into the shades the greatest of historians, perhaps the greatest of English prose writers. What do we really know about it? The first hint of trouble given by the hydrocele occurs in a letter by Gibbon to his friend Lord Sheffield. It is so delicious, so typical of the eighteenth century, of which Gibbon himself was probably the most typical representative, that I cannot resist re-telling it. Two days before, he has hinted to his friend that he was rather unwell; now he modestly draws the veil. “Have you never observed, through my inexpressibles, a large prominency _circa genitalia_, which, as it was not very painful and very little troublesome, I had strangely neglected for many years?” “A large prominency _circa genitalia_” is a variation on the “lump in me privits, doctor,” to which we are more accustomed. Gibbon’s is the more graceful, and reminds us of the mind which had described chivalry as the “worship of God and the ladies”; the courteous and urbane turn of speech which refuses to call a spade a spade lest some polite ear may be offended.