wards of military virtue. They were intrusted with offices of the highest dignity and most extensive power. Thus, another profession than that of arms came to be introduced among the laity, and was reputed honourable.

The functions of civil life were attended to. The talents requisite for discharging them were cultivated. A new road was opened to wealth and eminence. The arts and virtues of peace were placed in their proper rank, and received their due recompense.

While improvements, so important with respect to the state of society and the administration of justice, gradually made progress in Europe, sentiments more liberal and generous had begun to animate the nobles. These were inspired by the spirit of chivalry, which though considered commonly as a wild institution, the effect of caprice, and the source of extravagance, arose naturally from the state of society at that period, and had a very serious influence in refining the manners of the European nations. The feudal state was a state of almost perpetual war, rapine, and anarchy; during which the weak and unarmed were exposed to insults or injuries. The power of the sovereign was too limited to prevent these wrongs, and the administration of justice too feeble to redress them. The most effectual protection against violence and oppression was often found to be that which the valour and generosity of private persons afforded. The same spirit of enterprise which had prompted so many gentlemen to take arms in defence of the oppressed pilgrims in Palestine, incited others to declare themselves the patrons and avengers of injured innocence at home. When the final reduction of the Holy Land, under the dominion of infidels, put an end to these foreign expeditions, the latter was the only employment left for the activity and courage of adventurers. To check the insolence of overgrown oppressors; to rescue the helpless from captivity; to protect or to avenge women, orphans, and ecclesiastics, who could not bear arms in their own defence; to redress wrongs and remove grievances, were deemed acts of the highest prowess and merit. Valour, humanity, courtesy, justice, honour were the characteristic qualities of chivalry. To these were added religion, which mingled itself with every passion and institution during the middle ages, and by infusing a large proportion of enthusiastic zeal, gave them such force as carried them to romantic excess. Men were trained to knighthood by a long previous discipline; they were admitted into the order by solemnities no less devout than pompous; every person of noble birth courted that honour; it was deemed a distinction superior to royalty; and monarchs were proud to receive it from the hands of private gentlemen.

This singular institution, in which valour, gallantry, and religion, were so strangely blended, was wonderfully adapted to the taste and genius of martial nobles; and its effects were soon visible in their manners. War was carried on with less ferocity when humanity came to be deemed the ornament of knighthood no less than courage. More gentle and polished manners were introduced when courtesy was recommended as the most amiable of knightly virtues. Violence and oppression decreased when it was reckoned meritorious to check and to punish them. A scrupulous adherence to truth, with the most religious attention to fulfil every engagement, became the distinguishing characteristic of a gentleman, because chivalry was regarded as the school of honour, and inculcated the most delicate sensibility with respect to those points. The admiration of these qualities, together with the high distinctions and prerogatives conferred on knighthood in every part of Europe, inspired persons of noble birth on some occasions with a species of military fanaticism, and led them to extravagant enterprises. But they deeply imprinted on their minds the principles of generosity and honour. These were strengthened by every thing that can affect the senses or touch the heart. The wild exploits of those romantic knights who sallied forth in quest of adventures are well known, and have been treated with proper ridicule. The political and permanent effects of the spirit of chivalry have been less observed. Perhaps the humanity which accompanies all

the operations of war, the refinements of gallantry, and the point of honour-the three chief circumstances which distinguish modern from ancient manners, may be ascribed in a great measure to this institution, which has appeared whimsical to superficial observers, but by its effects has proved of great benefit to mankind. The sentiments which chivalry inspired had a wonderful influence on manners and conduct during the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. They were so deeply rooted, that they continued to operate after the vigour and reputation of the institution itself began to decline.

his

EDWARD GIBBON, by birth, education and manners, an English gentleman, was born at Putney, in Surrey, on the twenty-seventh of April, 1737. His father was of an ancient Hampshire family, of wealth and influence, and Edward, in consequence of the delicacy of his constitution, received his early education at home. At the age of fifteen, his health having improved with years, he entered Magdalen College, Oxford. He had previously been a close student, and carried with him to the university, a vast amount of erudition; but after having spent fourteen months, in comparative idleness, devoting himself chiefly to the works of Bossuet and Parsons the Jesuit, he became a convert to the Roman Catholic religion. He went to London, and at the feet of a priest, 'solemnly though privately abjured the errors of heresy.' His father, in order to reclaim him, placed him, for some years, at Lausanne, in Switzerland, under the charge of M. Pavilliard, a Calvinistic clergyman, whose judicious conduct prevailed upon his pupil to return to the bosom of the Protestant church. On Christmas day, 1754, he received the sacrament in the Protestant church at Lausanne. 'It was here,' says the future historian, 'that I suspended my religious inquiries, acquiescing with implicit belief in the tenets and mysteries which are adopted by the general consent of Catholics and Protestants.'

At Lausanne Gibbon became, by a regular and severe course of study, familiar with the Latin and French languages, and with general literature. In the twenty-second year of his age he returned to England, and three years afterwards appeared as an author in a slight French treatise, an Essay on the Study of Literature. He next accepted the commission of Captain in the Hampshire militia; and though his studies were interrupted, ‘the discipline and evolutions of a modern battle,' he remarks, ‘gave him a clearer notion of the phalanx and the legion, and the captain of the Hampshire grenadiers was not useless to the Historian of the Roman Empire.'

On the peace of 1762, Gibbon was released from his military duties, and paid a visit to France and Italy. He had long been meditating some historical work, and whilst at Rome, in 1764, his choice was determined by an incident of a striking and romantic nature. As I sat musing,' he says, 'amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.' Many years, however, elapsed before he carried his intentions into effect. On his return to England, in 1765, he seems to have passed some years in fashionable idleness; but the death of

his father, which occurred in 1770, made it necessary that he should form some independent plan of life. The estate which he inherited was much involved, and he therefore determined to quit the country and reside permanently in London. Here, being thrown comparatively on his own resources, he now undertook the composition of the first volume of his history. 'At the outset,' he remarks, ' all was dark and doubtful; even the title of the work, the true era of the decline and fall of the empire, the limits of the introduction, the division of the chapters, and the order of the narrative; and I was often tempted to cast away the labor of seven years. The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise. Many experiments were made before I could hit the middle tone, between a dull tone and a rhetorical declamation: three times did I compose the first chapter, and twice the second and third, before I was tolerably satisfied with their effect. In the remainder of the way, I advanced with a more equal and easy pace.'

In 1774, Gibbon was returned for the borough of Liskeard, and sat in parliament eight sessions during the memorable contest between Great Britain and the American colonies. Prudence, he says, condemned him to acquiesce in the humble station of a mute; the great speakers filling him with despair, and the bad ones with terror. In 1776, he published the first volume of his history, the success of which was, for a grave historical work, almost unprecedented. "The first impression was exhausted in a few days; a second and a third edition was scarcely adequate to the demand, as the book was found on every table and almost on every toilette.' His brother historians, Robertson and Hume, generously greeted him with warm applause. Whether I consider the dignity of your style,' says Hume, 'the depth of your matter, or the extensiveness of your learning, I must regard the work as equally the object of esteem.'

There was a still stronger bond of union than that which the admiration for genius could create, between the English and the Scottish historian. Gibbon had insidiously, though too unequivocally, evinced his adoption of infidel principles. 'The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world, were all,' he remarks, 'considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful.' Some feeling of this kind constituted the whole of his religious belief; and hence in the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of his work, he gave an account of the growth and progress of Christianity, which he accounted for solely by secondary causes, without a single reference to its divine origin. It is true, he nowhere avows his disbelief; but by tacitly sinking the early and astonishing spread of Christianity during the time of the apostles, and dwelling with exaggerated coloring and minuteness, on the errors and corruptions by which it afterwards became debased, the historian in effect conveys an impression that its divine origin is but a poetical fable, like the golden age of the poets, or the mystic absurdities of Mohammedanism.

The second and third volumes of Gibbon's great work appeared in 1781;

and immediately after their publication, finding it necessary to retrench his expenses, he retired to Lausanne, and there, in 1787, completed his task. Of this event he himself has left us the following account: 'It was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th of June, 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 berceau, or 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 dissemble the first emotions 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 whatsoever might be the future date of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.' From Lausanne he returned to London to superintend the publication of his three last volumes, the appearance of which he did not long survive. His health had, for some time, been delicate, and exhausted by surgical operations, he died without pain, and apparently without any sense of his danger, on the sixteenth of January, 1794.

In most of the essential qualifications of a historian, Gibbon was equal to either Hume or Robertson; and in some things he was superior to either. He had greater depth and variety of learning, and a more perfect command of his intellectual treasures. It was not merely with the main stream of Roman history that he was familiar; all its accessaries and tributaries—the art of war, philosophy, theology, jurisprudence, the most minute details of geography, every shade of manners, opinions, and public character, in Roman and cotemporaneous history, he had studied with laborious diligence and complete success. The vast range of his subject, and the tone of dignity which he preserves throughout the whole of his capacious circuit, also give him a superiority over his illustrious rivals. In concentrating his information, and presenting it in a clear and lucid order, he is no less remarkable, while his vivid imagination, quickening and adorning his varied knowledge, is fully equal to his other powers. He identifies himself with whatever he describes, and paints local scenery, national costume or manners, with all the force and animation of an eye-witness.

But these solid and bright acquirements of the historian were not without their drawbacks. Gibbon's mind was more material or sensual than philosophical-more fond of splendor and display, than of the beauty of virtue, or the grandeur of moral heroism. His taste was vitiated and impure, so that his style is not only deficient in chaste simplicity, but is disfigured by offensive pruriency and occasional grossness. The want of one great harmonizing spirit of humanity and genuine philosophy to give unity to the splendid mass, becomes painfully visible on a calm review of the entire work. After once attentively reading it, we seldom recur to it a second time, unless it is to notice some particular fact or description. Such is the importance

of simplicity and purity in a voluminous narrative, that this great historian is seldom read but as a study, while Hume and Robertson are always perused as a pleasure. We close this extensive notice with the following brief

extracts:

OPINION OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHERS ON THE IMMORTALITY OF THE

SOUL.

The writings of Cicero represent in the most lively colours the ignorance, the errors, and the uncertainty of ancient philosophers with regard to the immortality of the soul. When they are desirous of arming their disciples against the fear of death, they inculcate, as an obvious though melancholy position, that the fatal stroke of our dissolution releases us from the calamities of life; and that those can no longer suffer who no longer exist. Yet there were a few sages of Greece and Rome who had conceived a more exalted, and in some respects a juster idea of human nature; though, it must be confessed, that in the sublime inquiry, their reason had often been guided by their imagination, and that their imagination had been prompted by their vanity. When they viewed with complacency the extent of their own mental powers; when they exercised the various faculties of memory, of fancy, and of judgment, in the most profound speculations, or the most important labours; and when they reflected on the desires of fame, which transported them into future ages, far beyond the bounds of death and of the grave; they were unwilling to confound themselves with the beasts of the field, or to suppose that a being, for whose dignity they entertained the most sincere admiration, could be limited to a spot of earth, and to a few years of duratlon. With this favourable prepossession, they summon to their aid the science, or rather the language, of metaphysics. They soon discovered, that as none of the properties of matter will apply to the operations of the mind, the human soul must consequently be a substance distinct from the bodypure, simple, and spiritual, incapable of dissolution, and susceptible of a much higher degree of virtue and happiness after the release from its corporeal prison. From these specious and noble principles, the philosophers who trod in the footsteps of Plato, deduced a very unjustifiable conclusion, since they asserted not only the future immortality, but the past eternity of the human soul, which they were too apt to consider as a portion of the infinite and self-existing spirit, which pervades and sustains the universe. A doctrine thus removed beyond the senses and the experience of mankind, might serve to amuse the leisure of a philosophic mind; or, in the silence of solitude, it might sometimes impart a ray of comfort to desponding virtue; but the faint impression which had been received in the school was soon obliterated by the commerce and business of active life. We are sufficiently acquainted with the eminent persons who flourished in the age of Cicero, and of the first Cæsars, with their actions, their characters, and their motives, to be assured that their conduct in this life was never regulated by any serious conviction of the rewards or punishments of a future state. At the bar and in the senate of Rome, the ablest orators were not apprehensive of giving offence to their hearers by exposing that doctrine as an idle and extravagant opinion, which was rejected with contempt by every man of a liberal education and understanding.

Since, therefore, the most sublime efforts of philosophy can extend no farther than feebly to point out the desire, the hope, or at most the probability, of a future state, there is nothing except a divine revelation that can ascertain the existence and describe the condition of the invisible country which is destined to receive the souls of men after their separation from the body.