"Gibbon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... drudgery which they regarded as the price of success. Addison amassed as much as three folios of manuscript materials before he began writing. Newton wrote his Chronology fifteen times over before he was satisfied with it; and Gibbon wrote out his Memoir nine times. Hale studied for many years at the rate of sixteen hours a day, and when wearied with the study of the law, he would recreate himself with philosophy and the study of mathematics. ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... wrist—"Dinah and I both thought it would be a capital arrangement to take Red Brae for three or four months. There would be plenty of room for you, and your father and Theo too," she continued as he remained silent; "and it would be so nice for us to be together, and our old nurse Mrs. Gibbon—you know Mrs. Gibbon, dear—would help us ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... vision of Mahmud of the taking of Constantinople in 1453, see Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", volume 12 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... indeed, internal evidence would be sufficient to establish this if we had no positive external testimony whatsoever. He came at a fortunate time, when the stately yet not pompous or over-elaborated model of the latest Georgian prose, raised from early Georgian "drabness" by the efforts of Johnson, Gibbon, and Burke, but not proceeding to the extremes of any of the three, was still the academic standard; but when a certain freedom on the one side, and a certain grace and colour on the other, were being taken from the new experiments of nineteenth-century prose proper. Whether he or his contemporary ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... military monarchy and verified itself all the more completely, that, under the impulse of its creator's genius and in the absence of all material complications from without, that monarchy developed itself more purely and freely than any similar state. From Caesar's time, as the sequel will show and Gibbon has shown long ago, the Roman system had only an external coherence and received only a mechanical extension, while internally it became even with him utterly withered and dead. If in the early stages of the autocracy and above all ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the name of the Golden-flowing" (p 183.) Now Mr. Saunders certainly, whatever Warton did, has confounded Damascenus, the physician, with Johannes Damascenus Chrysorrhoas, "the {323} last of the Greek Fathers," (Gibbon, iv. 472.) a voluminous writer on ecclesiastical subjects, but no physician, and therefore not at all likely to be found among the books ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... coining, money-changing and all that, why, think what you have then! The brokers at Corinth, the mensarii in the Roman Forum. And think of the ducats designed by Da Vinci and by Cellini! And all the Byzantine coins in Gibbon—the student's edition is full of them! Why, there are even the Assyrian tablets—you must have heard about the discovery of the records of that old Babylonian bank. Think of the costumes, the architecture, the square curled beards, the flat winged lions, and all. Why, dear me, I see the whole ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... for Lausanne to-day. We intend to stop at the Hotel Gibbon. It is not probable that any further journey will be made. Business most favorable, and prospects are that every thing will soon be brought ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... always be regarded as a masterpiece. It is impossible, however, not to wish that four or five likenesses which have no interest for posterity were wanting to that noble gallery; and that their places were supplied by sketches of Johnson and Gibbon, as happy and vivid as the sketches ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to another the frank and pagan joy in life of Anacreon and Horace. Rousseau and Grote will each in his own way appropriate the lesson of Liberty, while others will turn to the story of the militant and dominant aristocracy of Rome. Goethe and Keats, Milton and Gibbon, Berkeley and Schopenhauer, will each draw their inspiration from the classics, but the result will not be to make them resemble one another, it will be to give vigour, decision, form, resolution, and dignity to the ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... we have any knowledge from history, this must have been the case; and Gibbon fully admits and insists upon it. Indeed, no infidel hypothesis can afford to do without the virtues of the early Christians in accounting for the success of the falsehoods of Christianity. Hard alternatives ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... before, perusing Gibbon and Rousseau, Manzoni, Herder and Chamfort,(85) Madame de Stael, Bichat, Tissot: He read the unbelieving Bayle, Also the works of Fontenelle, Some Russian authors he perused— Nought in the universe refused: Nor almanacs nor newspapers, Which lessons unto us repeat, Wherein I castigation get; ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... the Period. Literary Characteristics. The Classic Age. Alexander Pope. Jonathan Swift. Joseph Addison. "The Tatler" and "The Spectator." Samuel Johnson. Boswell's "Life of Johnson." Later Augustan Writers. Edmund Burke. Edward Gibbon. The Revival of Romantic Poetry. Thomas Gray. Oliver Goldsmith. William Cowper. Robert Burns. William Blake. The Minor Poets of the Romantic Revival. James Thomson. William Collins. George Crabbe. James Macpherson. Thomas Chatterton. ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... After having quoted Gibbon's narrative of the destruction of the colossal statue of Serapis by Theophilus, Mr. Garfield said: "So slavery sat in our national Capitol. Its huge bulk filled the temple of our liberty, touching it from side to side. Mr. Lincoln, on the 1st of January, ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... neighbourhood and is delightful in itself, not only for the charm of its surroundings, but for its quaint and attractive architecture of the humbler sort. The Early English church has been well restored and beautified by the Earl of Sheffield, whose estate lies to the west. Gibbon the historian lies in the Sheffield mausoleum. Note the old glass in the small lancet windows; this was buried in the churchyard during some forgotten trouble and discovered and replaced during the restoration. Several old helmets and gauntlets with the crest of the Nevill's are ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... daily bread. Adrian was an epicurean; one whom Epicurus would have scourged out of his garden, certainly: an epicurean of our modern notions. To satisfy his appetites without rashly staking his character, was the wise youth's problem for life. He had no intimates except Gibbon and Horace, and the society of these fine aristocrats of literature helped him to accept humanity as it had been, and was; a supreme ironic procession, with laughter of Gods in the background. Why not laughter of mortals also? Adrian had ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... [Footnote 1: Gibbon, in his 37th chapter, makes Ulphilas also an Arian, but might have forborne, with grace, his own definition of orthodoxy:—and you are to observe generally that at this time the teachers who admitted the inferiority ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... pair of windows, numbers 39 and 40, also removed in 1788, still offer, in their rose, the figure of a member of the Courtenay family. Gibbon was so much attracted by the romance of the Courtenays as to make an amusing digression on the subject which does not concern us or the cathedral except so far as it tells us that the Courtenays, ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... and Gibbon and many important Union officers were wounded. This, together with other causes, prevented Meade from assuming the offensive. Two-thirds of the Confederate Army had not been engaged actively in the last struggle, and the day was too ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... to himself; it partakes more of the style of the writers of the last century than of the style of the present age. It possesses great merit, but sometimes is negligent and loose. Mr. Gibbon mentioned it to the editor in warm terms of commendation; and was astonished when he heard how much of our author's life had been spent abroad. Speaking of our author's Lives of the Saints, (vol. iv. 457,) he calls it "a work of merit,—the sense and learning ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... the text is merely a peg upon which to hang a mass of curious learning such as few other men have ever dreamt of. The voluminous note on circumcision [482] is an instance in point. There is no doubt that he obtained his idea of esoteric annotation from Gibbon, who, though he used the Latin medium, is in this respect the true father of Burton. We will give specimens of the annotations, taken haphazard—merely premising that the most characteristic of them—those at which the saints in heaven knit their brows—necessarily in a work of this kind exclude ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... and from thence, at the invitation of Manuel, returned to Constantinople. It was Louis who, at the passage of the Maeander, was engaged in a "glorious action." Wilken, vol. iii. p. 179. Michaud vol. ii. p. 160. Gibbon followed Nicetas.—M.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... in the front rank of the historians of antiquity for the accuracy of his learning, the fairness of his judgments, the richness, concentration, and precision of his style. His great successor, Gibbon, called him a "philosophical historian, whose writings will instruct the last generations of mankind"; and Montaigne knew no author "who, in a work of history, has taken so broad a view of human events or given a more just ...
— Tacitus on Germany • Tacitus
... The Renegades' Retreat over the Lo Lo Trail. Intercepted by Captain Rawn, They Flank His Position and Continue Their Flight Through the Bitter Root Valley Toward the "Buffalo Country". General Gibbon in ...
— The Battle of the Big Hole • G. O. Shields
... Matthew Rea do. Robert Young in Postle Jas. Morton shoemaker Calton John Morison do. there Wm. Somerville miller Glasgow Wm. Henderson weaver there John Falconer there William Allan there John Gray Westmuir James Ralston Glasgow Wm. M'Gibbon there Agnes Dalrymple there James Glen farmer Woodside James Dickson Auldhousebridge James Findlay weaver Gorbals Peter Gray coalhewer Shettleston James Graham Glasgow Wm. Loudon gardener Dalbeth Agnes Dyer Glasgow Margaret Boyd there James Logan miller Woodside Jas. Graham shoemaker Calton ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... Johnson, the exquisite polish of Pope, the lyric fire of Campbell, the graphic powers of Scott, the glowing eloquence of Burke, the admirable conceptions of Reynolds, the profound sagacity of Hume, the pictured page of Gibbon, demonstrate how mighty and varied have been the triumphs of the human mind in these islands, in every branch of poetry, literature, and philosophy. Yet, strange to say, during two centuries thus marvellously illustrated by genius, intellect, and capacity ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... in New York, however, who felt that the rights of a delegate were sacred. They organized a society and appointed just three delegates to that Temperance Convention. Those three persons were Wendell Phillips, of Boston; Mr. Cleveland, one of the editors of the Tribune; and Mr. Gibbon, son-in-law of the late venerated Isaac T. Hopper. The last two were men from New York City. The question was already decided that women might be received as delegates to that Convention; therefore there was no need of appointing any one to insist upon woman's ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... consists of more than one hundred thousand word-signs, admit of any readier mode. But they print, or rather rub off, impressions with such speed—seven hundred sheets per hour—that, until the introduction of steam, they far outstripped Europeans. Gibbon, it will be remembered, regrets that the emperor Justinian, who lived in the sixth century, did not introduce the art of printing from the Chinese, instead ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... M.A., forms the new volume of the same publisher's Classical Library. Mr. Bohn has this month commenced a New Series under the title of Bohn's British Classics. The first work is an edition of Gibbon's Decline and Fall, with the notes of Guizot, Wenck, and other continental writers; and farther illustrations by an English Churchman. In thus choosing Gibbon, Mr. Bohn has not shown his usual tact. He may not mean his edition to be a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... In the Gibbon Basin is a geyser of late origin. In 1878 this consisted of two steam holes, roaring on the side of a hill, that looked as if they had recently burst through the surface; and the gully leading towards the ravine ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... Proculus, it has been noted that he was associated with Bonosus, who was as renowned in the field of Bacchus as was Proculus in that of Venus (Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire). The feat of Proculus is told in his own words, in Vopiscus, (Hist. Augustine, p. 246) where he recounts having captured one hundred Sarmatian virgins, and unmaidened ten of them in one night, together ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain
... work will take up the History at the point at which Dean Liddell leaves off, and carry it down to the period at which Gibbon begins. ...
— Mr. Murray's List of New and Recent Publications July, 1890 • John Murray
... true apes, possess an overwhelming importance, far beyond that of the baboons and monkeys. There are only four principal kinds now existing, namely, the gibbon, orang-outang, chimpanzee, and the gorilla, of which the first is much less familiar than the others. The known species of gibbons occur in Indo-China and the Malay Peninsula. The typical animal stands about three feet high; its overarching braincase, enlarged in conformity ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... from a follower of Genghis Khan, founder of the Mongol empire; or, as some say, directly, by the mother's side, from Genghis himself. He is the Tamerlaine or Tamburlaine of Marlowe and other dramatists. Gibbon introduces him in the Decline and Fall, apparently because fascinated with the subject, although he gives as a historical reason the fact that Timur's triumph in Asia delayed the final fall of Constantinople—taken by the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... history studies history from books in which long series of facts and their possible relations are presented in the light in which they are seen by Mommsen or Gibbon or Macaulay or Froude. Meanwhile the student of literature sees incidentally, but, so far as he goes, more vividly, into the actual life of breathing men through the legend of Beowulf or the Vision of Piers Plowman, through Chaucer or the Spectator, through Ben Jonson's ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... is quite possible that the Parsi Nameh of that work suggested to Platen the composition of his poem.[143] His best known ballad, "Harmosan," written in 1830, has a Persian warrior for its hero. The source for the poem is probably Gibbon's Decline and Fall of ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... not all the lucky possessors of such a capacity for acquiring knowledge. Wide reading may be good from an educational point of view, but unless we are able to assimilate what we read better a thousand times to restrict our reading. Gibbon's advice is bad, for it indicates merely the system he employed in compiling his monumental work. 'We ought not,' he remarks, 'to attend to the order of our books so much as (to the order) of our thoughts.' So, in the ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... collected on the banks of the Dead Sea, and which, when in a state of ignition, could only be extinguished by a very singular mixture, and which it was not likely to come in contact with. It produced a thick smoke and loud explosion, and was capable, says Gibbon, of communicating its flames with equal vehemence in descent or lateral progress, [Footnote: For a full account of the Greek five, see Gibbon, chapter 53] In sieges, it was poured from the ramparts, or launched like our bombs, in red-hot balls of stone ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... men this world ever saw have not patronized matrimony. Cowper, Pope, Newton, Swift, Locke, Walpole, Gibbon, Hume, Arbuthnot, were single. Some of these marriage would have helped. The right kind of a wife would have cured Cowper's gloom, and given to Newton more practicability, and been a relief to Locke's overtasked brain. A Christian wife might have converted ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... coeval with the foundation of Rome, but the number of the troops of which it was composed varied at different periods. It rarely exceeded six thousand men. Gibbon estimates the number at six thousand eight hundred and twenty-six men. For many centuries it was composed exclusively of Roman citizens. Up to the year B.C. 107, no one was permitted to serve among the regular troops except those who were regarded as possessing a strong ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... members, and there is scarcely one among them whose name is not known to-day as well as any in the history of our literature. Besides the high priests, Reynolds and Johnson, there came Edmund Burke, Fox, Sheridan, and many another of less note, to represent the senate: Goldsmith, Gibbon, Adam Smith, Malone, Dr. Burney, Percy, Nugent, Sir William Jones, three Irish bishops, and a host of others, crowded in from the ranks of learning and literature. Garrick and George Colman found here an indulgent audience; and the light portion of the company comprised ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... the leading-strings of any literary history, and I consequently turned my attention from the historical studies, which seemed to be my own peculiar province, and in which department Droysen's history of Alexander and the Hellenistic period, as well as Niebuhr and Gibbon, were of great help to me, and fell back once more upon my old and trusty guide, Jakob Grimm, for the study of German antiquity. In my efforts to master the myths of Germany more thoroughly than had been possible in my former perusal of the Nibelung and the ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... station, and stole a passage of conversation with a kindly clergyman whom I found looking at the pretty shilling editions filling the cases. I said, How nice it was to have Hazlitt in that green cloth; and he said, Yes, but he held for Gibbon in leather; and just then his train came in and he ran off to it, and left me to my guilt in not having gone to see Durham. It was now twilight, and too late; but there the charming old town still is, ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... dry witticism in Gibbon, "Abu Rafe says he will be witness for this fact, but who will be witness for Abu Rafe?" but he remained silent, only fixing on Levy those dark observant eyes, with their contracted, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of Theodosius, but the real credit is due to a wealthy patrician, Florentius by name, who strongly censured this practice, to the Emperor, and offered his own property to make good the deficit which would appear upon its abrogation (Gibbon, vol. 2, p. 318, note). With the regulations and arrangements of the brothels, however, we have information which is far more accurate. These houses (lupanaria, fornices, et cet.) were situated, for the most part, in the Second District of the City (Adler, Description of the ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... one naturally makes on reading the life of Tacitus, is that he was admirably fitted by his distinguished military and political career for the duties of a historian. Gibbon said that his year in the yeomanry had been of more service to him in describing battles than any closet study could have been; and Tacitus has this great advantage over Livy that he had helped to make history as well as ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... of the Spencers has been illustrated and enriched by the trophies of Marlborough; but I exhort them to consider the 'Fairy Queen' as the most precious jewel of their coronet." Thus wrote Gibbon in his memoirs, and all must feel the beauty of the passage. Perhaps it is not too much to say that this nobility may claim another illustration from its ties of friendship and neighborhood with the family of Washington. It cannot doubt that hereafter the parish church of Brington ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... to find the famous English names of Gibbon and Boswell in the list of the multitudes with whom he had to do at this time.[147] The former was now at Lausanne, whither he had just returned from that memorable visit to England which persuaded him ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... superior as rivalling Naushirvan in justice is a commonplace of flattery. The prophet Muhammad was born during his reign, and was proud of the fact. The alleged expedition of Naushirvan into India is discredited by the best modern writers. Gibbon tells the story of the wars between the two Khusrus and the Romans in his forty-sixth chapter, and a critical history of the reigns of both Khusru (Khosrau) I and Khusru II will be found in Professor ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... than an intellectual revulsion. To his true followers, indeed, like Jonathan {167} Edwards, it seems "a delightful doctrine, exceeding bright, pleasant and sweet." [Sidenote: Eternal damnation] But many men agree with Gibbon that it makes God a cruel and capricious tyrant and with William James that it is sovereignly irrational and mean. Even at that time those who said that a man's will had no more to do with his destiny than the stick in a man's hand could choose ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... fundamental truths consistently firm. She did not accommodate her opinions to meet the exigencies of different coteries, nor was she addicted to compromise. She was equally at ease in discussing the merits of Rasselas with Dr. Johnson, the curiosities of art with Lord Orford, Roman history with Gibbon, and the state of the Church with Bishop Porteus. Not that she pretended equality of learning with such men, but she had just sufficient knowledge of various subjects to provoke a conversation, and enough cleverness to sustain it by "drawing out" the scholar ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... with the wreckage, return good for evil. How, in that office, a complete set of "Gibbon" was scarred all along the back as by a flint; how so much black and copying ink came to be mingled with Manders's gore on the table-cloth; why the big gum-bottle, unstoppered, had rolled semicircularly across the floor; and in what manner the white china door-knob ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... the end of the war. Everything has gone by the contrary. Our people have done as well as their neighbours, and better, with their imaginations, whether in diplomacy, strategy or tactics. Where the Gibbon or Plutarch who survives the War Office Censor is going to damn their reputations into heaps is over their failure in business commonsense. Under their noses, parts of their system, were two great live organisms; the Indian Army and the Territorial Force. ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... has something of the endless dignity of the Laocooen! The second tower is a miniature library, whose shelves are crowded with the pet books of Jim's boyhood—queer books, some of them, for a child to choose: "Byron," "Letters of Pliny," Plutarch's "Lives," Gibbon's "Rome," "Morte d'Arthur," Maeterlinck's "Life of the Bee," Kingsland's "Scientific Idealism," with several quite learned volumes of astronomy and geology, side by side with Gulliver and all kinds of travel and story-books which ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the audience, yet I suspect Louis XVIII is by no means of a relenting nature, and that he is as little inclined to pardon political trespasses as his ancestor Louis IX was disposed to pardon those against religion; for, according to Gibbon, his recommendation to his followers was: "Si quelqu'un parle contre la foi chretienne dans votre presence, donnez ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... had entered Parliament as a nominee of Lord Rockingham's. Gibbon sat in the House for some years under patronage. Gladstone first became a member by presentation to a pocket borough, and later spoke in praise of this method of bringing young men of promise into Parliament. John Wilson Croker estimated ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... came forward with his hat in his hand. He looked as if he had just landed from the Eighteenth Century. His figure was that of Mr. Edward Gibbon. 'Yes, madam,' he said, in a markedly deferential tone, fussing about with the rim of his hat as he spoke, and adjusting his pince-nez. 'I was recommended to your—ur—your establishment for shorthand ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... fact that there were Saxon settlers in England before the arrival of Hengist and Horsa seems settled, by the appointment of a "Comes Littoris Saxonici in Britannica."[191] The date of this official and imperial Roman document is fixed by Gibbon between A.D. 395 and 407. About forty years earlier we have—what is more to our present purpose—a notice by Ammianus Marcellinus of Saxons being leagued with the Picts and Scots, and invading the territories south of the Forth, which were held by the Romans and their conquered allies ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... constantly to pass the latter evenings of his life. Rousseau there received at a distance the only worship which his proud sensitiveness would accept even from princes. Franklin and the American republicans; Gibbon and the orators of the English opposition, Grimm and the German philosophers, Diderot, Sieyes, Sillery, Laclos, Suard, Florian, Raynal, La Harpe, and all the thinkers or writers who anticipated the new mind, met there with celebrated artists and savans. ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... books he was very catholic. "Shaftesbury is not too genteel, nor Jonathan Wild too low. But for books which are no books," such as "scientific treatises, and the histories of Hume, Smollett, and Gibbon," &c., he confesses that he becomes splenetic when he sees them perched up on shelves, "like false saints, who have usurped the true shrines" of the legitimate occupants. He loved old books and authors, indeed, beyond most other things. He used to say (with Shakespeare), "The Heavens ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... MARCOSSON, of Louisville, must surely be the Great Chief of interviewers. Interviewing, he tells us, is, after all, only a form of reporting, and so are history, poetry and romance. What, he asks, were MOMMSEN and GIBBON, WORDSWORTH and KEATS but reporters, and I can only answer, What indeed? To have been found worthy of tonsure by Mr. MARCOSSON it is necessary to be very eminent, and to win his highest praise it is essential also to be a good "imparter," though he has a kind of sneaking admiration for the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... Benjamin Franklin were the only considerable names in American literature in all that period which, beginning with Milton and Dryden, and including the whole lives of Newton and Locke, reached the time of Hume and Gibbon, of Burke and Chatham, of Johnson and Goldsmith,—a period embracing five generations, filled with an unbroken succession of statesmen, philosophers, poets, divines, historians, who wrote for mankind and immortality. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... extreme, are merely convinced without being converted. They are appealed to by the idea of God, rather than led into actual fellowship of life with Him. A striking instance is the historian, Edward Gibbon, who, at the age of sixteen, unaided by the arguments of a priest and without the aesthetic enticements of the Mass, was brought by his reading to embrace Roman Catholicism, and had himself baptized by a Jesuit father in June, 1753. By Christmas of 1754 he had as thoughtfully ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... my voyage, I must turn to other topics and give you some account of my life on board. My time has passed very pleasantly: I have read a good deal; I have nearly finished Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, am studying Liebig's Agricultural Chemistry, and learning the concertina on the instrument of one of my fellow-passengers. Besides this, I have had the getting up and management of our choir. We practise three or four ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... the inscriptions from the catacombs, it affords an easy means, in the absence of a more specific date, for determining a period earlier than which any special inscription bearing it cannot have originated. Its use spread rapidly during the fourth century. It "became," says Gibbon, with one of his amusing sneers, "extremely fashionable in the Christian world." The story of the vision of Constantine was connected with it, and the Labarum displayed its form in the front of the imperial army. It was thus not merely the emblem of Christ, but that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... former concludes. Woltmann is a person of ability; but we dare not say of him, what Wieland said of Schiller, that by his first historical attempt he 'has discovered a decided capability of rising to a level with Hume, Robertson and Gibbon.' He will rather rise to a ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... local self-government on many towns (SS182, 183). For a similar reason the great nobles often granted the same powers to towns which they controlled. The result was that their immense estates were broken up in some measure. It was from this period, says the historian Gibbon, that the common people (living in these chartered towns) began to acquire political rights, and, what ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... for the history of Pope Joan, who succeeded Leo IV. and preceded Benedict III., than many we yet discover, and he wants not grounds that doubts it." So thought Sir Thomas Browne, in his Vulgar Errors, B. vii. Ch. 17. Gibbon, too, rejects it as fabulous. "Till the Reformation," he says, "the tale was repeated and believed without offence, and Joan's female statue long occupied her place among the Popes in the Cathedral of Sienna. She has been annihilated by two learned ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 75, April 5, 1851 • Various
... mooned pessimistically from shelf to shelf, his eye wandering among the titles of the books. The library consisted almost entirely of handsome "uniform editions": Irving, Poe, Cooper, Goldsmith, Scott, Byron, Burns, Longfellow, Tennyson, Hume, Gibbon, Prescott, Thackeray, Dickens, De Musset, Balzac, Gautier, Flaubert, Goethe, Schiller, Dante, and Tasso. There were shelves and shelves of encyclopedias, of anthologies, of "famous classics," of "Oriental masterpieces," of "masterpieces of oratory," and more shelves ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... interesting book. There is not a dull page in it. It is made up of various lectures delivered by the accomplished author, at different times, on the Greek language and history. Magnificent as Gibbon's work is on the Byzantine Empire, the contemptuous tone he uses toward it has much misled modern writers and readers in their estimation of that wonderful monarchy. A state which lasted as that did in the face of so many difficulties, could not have been so badly governed ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... He was in one phase of the word a HARD and yet by no means a self-destructive drinker, for he had an iron constitution and could consume spirituous waters with the minimum of ill effect. He had what Gibbon was wont to call "the most amiable of our vices," a passion for women, and he cared no more for the cool, patient, almost penitent methods by which his father had built up the immense reaper business, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... in the matter" candidly replied my infidel friend. But, as if wishing to effect a diversion,—"Have you ever read Gibbon's celebrated chapter?" ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... can hardly wonder that the time spent at Oxford was, to a man like Gibbon, "the most idle and unprofitable period of his life," to use his own words. Even under the very different system which prevailed in the early portion of the present century, one of the most fertile thinkers of our ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... of manuscripts. Outside the domain of art we find little among the Romans of the East that can in any sense be called original. They were excellent at an epitome or a lexicon, and were very successful as librarians. The treasures of antiquity, as Gibbon has said, were imparted in such extracts and abridgments 'as might amuse the curiosity without oppressing the indolence of the public.' The Patriarch Photius stands out as a literary hero among the commentators and critics of the ninth century. That famous book-collector, in analysing the contents ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... Eutropius, the eunuch and minister at the court of Arcadius, see Gibbon, [Decline and Fall, 1825, ii. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... First Cavalry Division supported him on the right. A reconnoissance sent across the Appomattox reports the enemy moving on the Cumberland road to Appomattox Station, where they expect to get supplies. Custer is still pushing on. If General Gibbon and the Fifth Corps can get up to-night, we will perhaps finish the job in the morning. I do not think Lee means to surrender until ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... therefore, mark the boundary of the Mohammedan advance in Western Europe. Gibbon, in his narrative of these great events, makes this remark: "A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire—a repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... rid of the Romans first. I confided my idea to a man the other day, and when he had floored me with the Romans as usual, I went and looked up Gibbon.' ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... of Greek Thought upon the Christian Church (Williams & Norgate, $1.00), and RENAN, The Influence of Rome on the Development of the Catholic Church (Williams & Norgate, $1.00), are very important for the advanced student. The best of the numerous editions of Gibbon's great work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which covers the whole history of the Middle Ages, is that edited by Bury (The Macmillan ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... sided with Gibbon in thinking that the Man in the Iron Mask might possibly have been Henry, the second son of Oliver Cromwell, who was held as a ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... society in that enlightened era, which, designated as the golden age of literature, was adorned by such distinguished orators, philosophers, historians, poets and naturalists as Cicero, Tacitus, Pliny, Horace and Virgil. In reference to this subject, Gibbon, in his history of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. I., chapter 2, says: "The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... fourth, let us say, would be conspicuous either by its utter absence or by its unwanted appearance. He could speak, when describing the Ragnall pictures, in rotund and flowing periods that would scarcely have disgraced the pen of Gibbon. Then suddenly that "h" would appear or disappear, and the illusion was over. It was like a sudden shock of cold water down the back. I never discovered the origin of his family; it was a matter of which he did not speak, perhaps because ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... condescend to accept his money. "Well," he adds, in a spirit of sensible protest against these unprofitable international comparisons, "we may be dupes to French follies, but they are ten times greater fools to be the dupes of our virtues."[111] Gibbon met Helvetius (1763), and found him a sensible man, an agreeable companion, and the worthiest creature in the world, besides the merits of having a pretty wife and a hundred thousand livres a year. Warburton was invited to dine with him at Lord Mansfield's, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... a most valuable servant of the Company, and the author of a History of India, which, though certainly not free from faults, is, I think, on the whole, the greatest historical work which has appeared in our language since that of Gibbon, I mean Mr Mill, was examined on this point. That gentleman is well known to be a very bold and uncompromising politician. He has written strongly, far too strongly I think, in favour of pure democracy. He has gone so far as to maintain that no nation which has not a representative legislature, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... The historian Gibbon, very incredulous in many things, accepts without questioning the fables told upon this subject. No doubt the libraries of MSS. collected generation after generation by the Egyptian Ptolemies became, in the course of time, the most extensive ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... interest in the history of the trout. For all these years the fishes have been trying to mount the waterfalls in order to ascend to the plateau above. Year after year, as the spawning-time came on, they leaped against the falls of the Gardiner, the Gibbon, and the Firehole Rivers, but only to fall back impotent in the pools at their bases. But the mightiest cataract of all, the great falls of the Yellowstone, they finally conquered, and in this way it was done: not by the trout of the Yellowstone River, but by ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... silent as the Gospels. From the fifteenth chapter of the first volume of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire I ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... cannot excel one parable in brevity or in heavenly clarity: the two parts of Johnson's antithesis come to no more than this 'Our Lord has gone up to the sound of a trump: with the sound of a trump our Lord has gone up.' The Bible controls its enemy Gibbon as surely as it haunts the curious music of a light sentence of Thackeray's. It is in everything we see, hear, feel, because it is in us, in ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... "unbridled dissipation," seeking solace for the agony he experienced from the conduct of his stern mother, who ruthlessly nipped in the bud his affection for a bonny lass at Dychmont. He might have used the very words of Gibbon, whose father nipped, in a similar way, his attachment for Mademoiselle Susan Curchod, afterward Madame Necker:—"After a painful struggle, I yielded to my fate: I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son; my wound was insensibly healed by time, absence, and the habits of a new ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... under Claudius), that, by the success of the Roman arms, the island and its savage inhabitants would soon be better known. It is amusing enough to peruse such passages in the midst of London.—Gibbon: c. i. ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... It is true that Mill, between his fourth and eighth years, read in the original all Herodotus and a good part of Xenophon, Lucian, Isocrates, Diogenes Laertius, Plato, and the Annual Register, besides Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Miller, Mosheim, and other historians; while before the age of thirteen he had mastered the whole of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Sallust, Thucydides, Aristotle's Rhetoric and Logic, Tacitus, Juvenal, Quinctilian, parts of Ovid, Terence, Nepos, Caesar, Livy, Lucretius, Cicero, Polybius, ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... places imperfect), began with the accession of Nerva, A.D. 96, where Tacitus and Suetonius end, and was continued to the death of Valens, A.D. 378, a period of 282 years. And there is probably no work as to the intrinsic value of which there is so little difference of opinion. Gibbon bears repeated testimony to his accuracy, fidelity, and impartiality, and quotes him extensively. In losing his aid after A.D. 378, he says, "It is not without sincere regret that I must now take leave of an accurate and faithful guide, who has composed the history of ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... motion which he had made in the previous session, for leave to bring in a bill, providing that in cases of intestacy, or in the absence of any settlement to the contrary, landed property be equally divided among the children or nearest relatives of the deceased. He quoted Adam Smith, Gibbon, Bentham, &c, in favour of an equal partition of property, and insisted that the system of primogeniture tended only to foster all the harsh and selfish passions of the human heart. The attorney-general opposed the motion. Mr. Ewart's ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... deny, for they are indisputable, though history is silent about them. I suppose, on this score, we ought to deny that the round towers of this country had any origin, because history does not disclose it; or that any individual came from Adam who cannot produce the table of his ancestry. Yet Gibbon argues against the darkness at the Passion, from the accident that it is not mentioned by Pagan historians:—as well might he argue against the existence of Christianity itself in the first century, because Seneca, Pliny, Plutarch, the Jewish Mishna, and other authorities are silent about it. Protestants ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... all kinds, for he had written Academic Prize Essays, struggled for India Companies, given dinners to Philosophes, and 'realised a fortune in twenty years.' He possessed, further, a taciturnity and solemnity; of depth, or else of dulness. How singular for Celadon Gibbon, false swain as he had proved; whose father, keeping most probably his own gig, 'would not hear of such a union,'—to find now his forsaken Demoiselle Curchod sitting in the high places of the world, as Minister's Madame, and 'Necker not ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... bear the unmistakable mark, not merely of historical accuracy and research, but of historical genius; and the genius is not that of Thierry or Guizot, of Gibbon or Macaulay, but has a palpable individuality of its own. They evince throughout a patient, persistent industry in investigating original documents, from the mere labor of which an Irish hod-carrier would shrink aghast, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... or that obligations are imposed by him upon his disciples that are subversive of the institution? Knowing as we do from cotemporary historians, that the institution of slavery existed at the time and to the extent stated by Gibbon—what sort of a soul a man must have, who, with these facts before him, will conceal the truth on this subject, and hold Jesus Christ responsible for a scheme of treason that would, if carried out, have brought the life of every human being on earth at the time, ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... Comnena, invested with the rank of Panhypersebastos, or Omnium Augustissimus; but Alexius deeply offended him, by afterwards recognising the superior and simpler dignity of a Sebastos. His eminent qualities, both in peace and war, are acknowledged by Gibbon: and he has left us four books of Memoirs, detailing the early part of his father-in-law's history, and valuable as being the work of an eye-witness of the most important events which he describes. Anna Comnena appears to have considered it her duty to take up the task which her husband ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... commentary upon mere chronological events, galvanized by the touch of his keen intellect and fine rhetoric into a deceitful vigor, and ornamented with the poisonous night-shade blossoms of a spurious philosophy. We may more justly seek some analogy between Gibbon and Motley, even if the search but discover points of difference so radical that a comparison is impossible. The solemn, measured, and splendid rhetoric of Gibbon is met by the animated, impetuous, and brilliant flow of Motley's thought. Neither leans to the ideal; with both ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... Ebion, this Cerinthus: see 'Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire', Chaps. 15, 21, 47. And see, especially, the able articles, "Cerinthus" and "Ebionism and Ebionites", in the 'Dictionary of Christian Biography', etc., edited by Dr. William Smith and Professor Wace. "'Ebion' as a name first personified ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... time, besides availing himself of the various modern works to which reference has been made above. If he has been sometimes obliged to draw conclusions from his authorities other than those drawn by Gibbon, and has deemed it right, in the interests of historic truth, to express occasionally his dissent from that writer's views, he must not be thought blind to the many and great excellencies which render the "Decline and Fall" one of the best, if not the best, of our histories. The mistakes of a writer ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... stampers,—Clayton Freeling told me not to be too down-hearted. I was myself inclined to think that I had better go back to the school in Brussels. But nevertheless I went to work, and under the surveillance of my elder brother made a beautiful transcript of four or five pages of Gibbon. With a faltering heart I took these on the next day to the office. With my caligraphy I was contented, but was certain that I should come to the ground among the figures. But when I got to "The Grand," as we used to ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... the Jews, we now turn to the Saracens in Cornwall. We shall not enter upon the curious and complicated history of that name. It is enough to refer to a short note in Gibbon,(83) in order to show that Saracen was a name known to Greeks and Romans, long before the rise of Islam, but never applied to the Jews by any writer of authority, not even by those who saw in the Saracens ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... most probably tell you that he has not one in stock; then, in his anxiety to do business, he will, perhaps, fish out a guide to Derbyshire, dated 1854—a shabby old book—and offer it for four or five shillings, the price of a Crabbe in eight volumes, or of Gibbon's Decline and Fall in six volumes, bound in calf. Talk to this man, and to the other eleven, and they will tell you that there is always a sale for guide-books—that the supply does not keep pace with the demand. ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... not to weep over the persecutions which the apprehensions of the government have caused to be instituted against literature, we ought to laugh at them. Whole volumes of the most sublime works of Gibbon, Robertson, Hume, and other great historians have been prohibited; and there is not one of our German poets—neither Goethe, nor Schiller, nor Herder, nor Wieland, nor Lessing, nor Jean Paul—whose works are not ostracized in German Austria. Fear and a bad ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... devoted much of his time to the instruction of her in the ancient life of the Eternal City. He had certain volumes of Livy, Niebuhr, and Gibbon, from which he read her extracts at night, shunning the scepticism and the irony of the moderns, so that there should be no jar on the awakening interest of his fair pupil and patient. A gentle cross-hauling ensued between them, that they grew conscious of and laughed over during ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Magdalen men of the past are the names of Cardinal Wolsey, Cardinal Reginald Pole, Addison, Gibbon, Collins, Wilson, John Hampden, and John Foxe, author of the Book of Martyrs. The ecclesiastical students included two cardinals, four archbishops, and about forty bishops; and my brother would have added to the Roll of Honour the name of our rector, the Rev. ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... case," said Hoppart. "In the last few weeks, I've been reading not only in the Bible but in the Fathers. I've read most of Athanasius, most of Eusebius, and—I'll confess it—Gibbon. I find all my old wonder come back. Why are we pinned to—to the amount of creed we are pinned to? Why for instance must you ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... employs its summer, in spinning out silken webs to trap the unwary? or Voltaire, the most learned man of his day, marshaling a great host of skeptics, and leading them out in the dark land of infidelity? or Gibbon, who showed an uncontrollable grudge against religion in his history of one of the most fascinating periods of the world's existence—the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire—a book in which, with all the splendors of his genius, he magnified the errors of Christian ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... "Trade edition;" the meaning of which being, that the copyright, instead of being the exclusive property of one person, is divided into shares and held by several. There are Trade editions of such voluminous authors as Shakspeare, Gibbon, Hume, and Robertson, for instance; and Alison's Europe, if published half a century back, might in all probability have been added to the list. The difference between the ancient and the modern usage appears to be this, that formerly when the type was ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 4, Saturday, November 24, 1849 • Various
... indeed, as Gibbon called it, "a golden volume, not unworthy of the leisure of Plato or of Tully." To belittle its originality and sincerity, as is sometimes done, with a view to saving the Christianity of the writer, is to misunderstand his mind and his method. The ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... by two passionate idealisms, one of the intellect, the other of the emotions. The first was ancient Greece and Rome—and he incarnated this passion in the picturesque figure of Julian Casti (in The Unclassed), toiling hard to purchase a Gibbon, savouring its grand epic roll, converting its driest detail into poetry by means of his enthusiasm, and selecting Stilicho as a hero of drama or romance (a premonition here of Veranilda). The second or heart's idol was Charles Dickens—Dickens as writer, Dickens as the ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... is the wanton faun And agile as the Hooluck gibbon, The children "walked" thee on the lawn, Tied with a bow of orange ribbon; And aye as irksomer grew the task Of fending off the Hun garotters In our mind's eye—if you must ask— We ate thee up from tail ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 19, 1919 • Various
... unlike what it was to the survivors of the last century. Severally, the innovators were not superior to the men of old. Muratori was as widely read, Tillemont as accurate, Liebnitz as able, Freret as acute, Gibbon as masterly in the craft of composite construction. Nevertheless, in the second quarter of this century, a new era began ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... the Basilica of Maxentius.[1] But these are only practical expansions of arts that are in themselves unpractical. The greatest work of the imperial age must be sought in its provincial administration. The significance of this we have come to understand, as not even Gibbon understood it, through the researches of Mommsen. By his vast labours our horizon has broadened beyond the backstairs of the Palace and the benches of the Senate House in Rome to the wide lands north and east and south of the Mediterranean, and we have ...
— The Romanization of Roman Britain • F. Haverfield
... Gibbon selects the period between the accession of Trajan and the death of Marcus Aurelius as the time in which the human race enjoyed more general happiness than they had ever known before, or had since known. Yet, says Mr. Froude, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... General Scott had been an industrious student of the law, and the knowledge thus acquired was of great service to him throughout his eventful career. He was well read in the standard English authors—Shakespeare, Milton, Addison, Pope, Johnson, Goldsmith, Dryden, Hume, Gibbon, and the early English novelists. He was a constant reader of the best foreign and American periodicals and the leading newspapers of the day. He was of the opinion that wars would never cease, and therefore took little ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright
... Steevens was destined to be the Kinglake of the Transvaal. That is patently indemonstrable. His war correspondence was not the work of a stately historian. He could, out of sheer imaginativeness, create for himself the style of the stately historian. His "New Gibbon"—a paper which appeared in 'Blackwood's Magazine'—is there to prove so much; but that was not the manner in which he usually wrote about war. He was essentially a man who had visions of things. Without ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... an indication of rank. In the later years of the Roman Empire, Gibbon says, "the meanest subjects of the Roman Empire [5th century] assumed the illustrious name of Patricius."—Decline and Fall, vol. viii. p. 300. Hence the confusion that arose amongst Celtic hagiographers, and the interchanging of the acts of several saints ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... for the present deprived you of the pleasure of reading Gibbon. If you cannot procure the loan of a London edition, I will send you that which I have here. In truth, I bought it for you, which is almost confessing a robbery. Edward Livingston and Richard Harrison have each a good set, and either would ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... favour of the populace; for it seems quite clear that the public had practically free entrance to them, the only charge mentioned by writers of the time being a quadrans, about a farthing of our money. Gibbon says, "The meanest Roman could purchase with a small copper coin the daily enjoyment of a scene of pomp and luxury which might excite the envy of the kings of Asia." And this language is not exaggerated. Not only were there private bath-rooms, swimming-baths, hot baths, vapour-baths, and, in fact, ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... indulgence of enthusiasm and eloquence, Petrarch, Italy, and Europe, were astonished by a revolution, which realized for a moment his most splendid visions.—Gibbon, chap. 1xx. ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... into the springs of action in his portraits as Saint-Simon does. He was too studied a believer in the puppetry of men and women to make them more than ridiculous. And unquestionably the vain race of authors lent itself admirably to his love of caricature. His account of the vanity of Gibbon, whose history he admired this side enthusiasm, shows how he delighted in playing with an egoistic ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... Variorum Notes, Vol. III., Bohn's British Classics. The third volume of this cheap and excellent reprint of Gibbon extends from Julian's expedition against the Persians to the accession of Marcian.—The Book of the Axe, containing a Piscatorial Description of that Stream, &c., by George P. R. Pulman. A pleasant semi-piscatorial, semi-antiquarian, gossiping volume, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 234, April 22, 1854 • Various
... disturbing resemblances to the drab case of the average person. You do not approach the classics with gusto—anyhow, not with the same gusto as you would approach a new novel by a modern author who had taken your fancy. You never murmured to yourself, when reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall in bed: "Well, I really must read one more chapter before I go to sleep!" Speaking generally, the classics do not afford you a pleasure commensurate with their renown. You peruse them with a sense of duty, a ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... his tone indicating quiet satisfaction. At Gibbon's bench he paused. "Ye'll no pit onything past him, a doot," he said, with a grim smile, ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... The descent of the Feildings from the house of Habsburg, through the counts of Laufenburg and Rheinfelden, long considered authentic, and immortalized by Gibbon, has been proved to have been based on forged documents. See J. H. Round, Peerage ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... diversity of the beings engendered by Heaven and earth. This monkey will skip and gambol to the highest peaks of mountains, jump about in the waters, and, eating the fruit of the trees, will be the companion of the gibbon and the crane. Like the deer he will pass his nights on the mountain slopes, and during the day will be seen leaping on their summits or in their caverns. That will be the finest ornament ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... animals were too strong for them: the Orang-outang's jaw dropped so as seriously to impair the vigour of his expression, the edifying Pelican screamed and flapped her wings, the Owl hissed again, the Macaw became loudly incoherent, and the Gibbon gave his hysterical laugh; while the Hyaena, after indulging in a more splenetic guffaw, agitated the question whether it would not be better to hush up the whole affair, instead of giving public recognition to an insect whose produce, it was now plain, had been much overestimated. But ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... with a point is shown in the photograph,[91] but it can easily be demonstrated—and Deniker has already pointed this out—that the figure is not that of an orang foetus at all, for that form has much smaller ears with no point; nor can it be a gibbon-foetus, as Deniker supposes, for the gibbon ear is also without a point. I myself regard it as that of a Macacus-embryo. But this mistake, which is due to Nitsche, in no way affects the fact recognised by Darwin, that ear-forms ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... which were familiar to me. They were these: "Such were the arts by which the Romans extended their conquests, and attained the palm of victory; and the concurring testimony of different authors enables us to describe them with precision..." I was startled: they are part of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," which I easily guessed that she ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... to Fernando Po, the native chiefs turned from him with contempt, believing that he could not have lost so dignified an appendage, without having committed some crime. This reminds me of a passage in the 15th chapter of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, viz. "The practice of shaving the beard excited the pious indignation of the Fathers of the Church, which practice (according to Tertullian) is a lie against our own faces, ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... that the great students are those who have combined the Teutonic thoroughness with the French comprehensiveness and lucidity. Gibbon and Mommsen are the great examples to which he points. England surely has been very rich in writers thorough and lucid, but we may observe that they follow rather the eighteenth-century tradition, with its intelligible common sense, than the ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... school is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul." The representative minds of the eighteenth century were such as Voltaire, the master of persiflage, destroying superstition with his souriere hideux; Gibbon, "the lord of irony," "sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer"; and Hume, with his thorough-going philosophic skepticism, his dry Toryism, and cool contempt for "zeal" of any kind. The characteristic products of the era were satire, burlesque, and travesty: "Hudibras," "Absalom ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... such an indication of modesty, to find that the rude and tin-lettered inhabitants of an island in the South-Sea, are not a whit behind their venerated sages in the manufacture of gods and godlings. Alas, poor Gibbon! must the popular religion of Otaheite, the licentious, the dissolute, the child-murdering, the unnatural Otaheite, be put on a level with the elegant mythology of Homer, and the mild, serviceable superstition of imperial Rome? Why not? Is ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... that she held. "Ah, no; he could rise above fat, that young man. I can see him fat with impunity. Would it become, then, somewhat the Talleyrand type? How many distinguished men have been fat. Napoleon, Renan, Gibbon, Dr. Johnson—" she turned her sheet as she mildly brought out the desultory list. "And all seem to end in n, do they not? I am glad that I asked Mr. Drew. He flavours the dish like an aromatic herb; and what a success he has been; hein? But he is the type of personal success. ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Mr. Jones? Old 'Decline and Fall' Jones? He never reads any book excepting Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Always declines a drink when offered, but he's sure to fall a moment later!" ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... to their being quartered there; Breck-road; Boundary-lane; Whitefield House; An Adventure; Mr. T. Lewis and his Carriage; West Derby-road; Zoological Gardens; Mr. Atkins; His good Taste and Enterprise; Lord Derby's Patronage; Plumpton's Hollow; Abduction of Miss Turner; Edward Gibbon Wakefield. ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... much in reading a MS. in a handwriting like mine?" I asked him one evening, on a sudden impulse at the end of a longish conversation whose subject was Gibbon's History. ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... conclusions even in Neander; and although he could not say, with Macaulay, that Gieseler was a rascal, of whom he had never heard, he missed no opportunity of showing his dislike for that accomplished artificer in mosaic. Looking at the literature before him, at England, with Gibbon for its one ecclesiastical historian; at Germany, with the most profound of its divines expecting the Church to merge in the State, he inferred that its historic and organic unity would only be recognised by Catholic science, while the ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... simplicity of the Christian Church. But neither the Protestant Christian, nor the sceptic philosopher, can claim a right to despise the sophistry which bewildered the judgment of Chillingworth, or the toils which enveloped the active and suspicious minds of Bayle and of Gibbon. The latter, in his account of his own conversion to the Catholic faith, fixes upon the very arguments pleaded by Dryden, as those which appeared to him irresistible. The early traditions of the Church, the express words of ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... deistical. He embraced a philosophy which looked to secondary rather than primal causes, which scouted any revelations that could not be explained by reason, or reconciled with scientific theories,—that false philosophy which intoxicated Franklin and Jefferson as well as Hume and Gibbon, and which finally culminated in Diderot and D'Alembert; the philosophy which became fashionable in German universities, and whose nearest approach was that of the exploded Epicureanism of the Ancients. Under the patronage of the infidel court, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... President Henault and Pont de Veyle, besides D'Alembert, Turgot, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Necker, Walpole, the Abbes Barthelemy and Pernetty, the Chevalier de Lisle, de Formant, le Docteur Gatti, Hume, Gibbon, Baron de Gleichen, and many other celebrities, including the Princesses de Beauvau, de Poix, de Talmont, the Duchesses de Choiseul, d'Aiguillon, de Gramont, the Marechale de Luxembourg, the Marquises de Boufflers and du Chatelet, ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, [Footnote: Although Rousseau has been thus classed, he was essentially a poet. The others, even Voltaire, were mere reasoners.] and their disciples, in favour of oppressed and deluded humanity, are entitled ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... negative. In passing through Jerusalem and in coasting the Dead Sea I had been exceedingly struck by the present state of Judaea and the conformity of the fate of the Jewish nation to the predictions of our Saviour; I had likewise been reading Gibbon's eulogy of Julian, and his account of the attempts made by that Emperor to rebuild the temple: so that the dream at such a time and in such a place was not an unnatural occurrence. Yet it was so vivid, and the image of the subject of it so peculiar, that it long affected my imagination, and whenever ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... his poetry, and will often take down the Areopagitica that he may breathe the air of high latitudes; but he has a corner in his heart for that evil living and mendacious bravo, but most perfect artist, Benvenuto Cellini. While he counts Gibbon's Rome, I mean the Smith and Milman edition in 8 vols., blue cloth, the very model of histories, yet he revels in those books which are the material for historians, the scattered stones out of which he builds his house, such as the diaries of John Evelyn and our gossip Pepys, and ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... years may be found in the best authors. For it is well observed by Dr. Ray, that, if the lad does not perceive the full significance of Shakspeare's thoughts or the deepest harmony of Spenser's verse, if he does not wholly appreciate the keen sagacity of Gibbon or the quiet charm of Prescott, he will, nevertheless, catch glimpses of the higher upper sphere in which a poet moves, and fix in his mind lasting images of purity and loveliness, or he will learn on good ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... struck Tommy was the number of books the engineer had in his cabin. A volume of Nat Gould, Ouida or "The Duchess" would be the largest library Tommy would have found in the other bunks; but here, before his wondering gaze, were Macaulay, Gibbon, Gorki, Conrad, Dickens, Zola, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Chaucer, Shaw, and what not. And what would Master Tommy have said had he known that his friend, even then, was working on a novel in which he, Tommy, would play ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... Amazonian dame is a favourite in folk-lore and is an ornament to poetry from the Iliad to our modern day. Such heroines, apparently unknown to the Pagan Arabs, were common in the early ages of Al-Islam as Ockley and Gibbon prove, and that the race is not extinct may be seen in my Pilgrimage (iii. 55) where the sister of Ibn Rumi resolved to take blood revenge ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... then be questioned whether he had forged the Annals unless it can be shown that in both parts of that work he now and again fell into the florid style found in his "Ruinarum Urbis Romae Descriptio", as quoted by the accomplished writer in the Daily News, (who took, as he said, the translation of Gibbon), to wit: "The temple is overthrown, the gold is pillaged, the wheel of Fortune ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... share in the rough-and-tumble sports of his comrades in a school which has given many distinguished men to the literature and public life of England: as, for instance, the younger Vane—whom Milton extolled—Ben Jonson and Dryden, Prior and Locke, Cowper and Southey, Gibbon and Warren Hastings. ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... Memoirs of his Life and Writings, page 148.—Perhaps Gibbon had this excellent line of Mrs. ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... 'On this day [i.e. 25th December] also the birth of Christ was lately fixed at Rome, in order that while the heathen were busy with their ceremonies [the Brumalia, in honour of Bacchus] the Christians might perform their rites undisturbed.' Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, writes: 'The [Christian] Romans, as ignorant as their brethren of the real date of his [Christ's birth] fixed the solemn festival to the 25th December, the ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... if a pretty verse-maker is privileged to be an undutiful son, what becomes of all our old notions? I think once more of the great Sir Walter, and I remember his unquestioning obedience to his parents. Then we may also remember Gibbon, who was quite as able and useful a man as Shelley. The historian loved a young French lady, but his father refused consent to their marriage, and Gibbon quietly obeyed and accepted his hard fate. The passion sanctified his whole life, and, as he says, made ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... my own restlessness and ambition, while they filled me with a pride in my father which saved my wounded egotism from a pang. Here, indeed, was one of those books which embrace an existence; like the Dictionary of Bayle, or the History of Gibbon, or the "Fasti Hellenici" of Clinton, it was a book to which thousands of books had contributed, only to make the originality of the single mind more bold and clear. Into the furnace all vessels of gold, of all ages, had been cast; but from the mould came the new coin, with ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... (10) Gibbon regrets this chronology, i.e. from the creation of the world, which he thinks preferable to the vulgar mode from the Christian aera. But how vague and uncertain the scale which depends on a point so remote and undetermined ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown |
