"Gibbon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... celebrated author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It is addressed to his friend M. D'Eyverdun (who was at that time at Leipsig), and has lately been found among a mass of papers in the house which M. D'Eyverdun possessed at Lausanne, and where Mr. Gibbon resided several years. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... or indeed, Gibbon's entire command, move up at the time when the Sixth Michigan cavalry was contending alone with a superior ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... 'Duchess of Devonshire, Miss Burney.' She made me a very civil compliment upon hoping my health was recovering; and Lady Spencer then, slightly, and as if unavoidably, said, 'Lady Elizabeth Foster.'" Gibbon said of the latter, that, "No man could withstand her; and that if she chose to beckon the Lord Chancellor from his woolsack, in full sight of the world, he could not resist obedience." Reynolds painted a portrait of ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing
... with justice observed, that, by losing Goldsmith, Garrick, Nugent, Chamier, Beauclerk, we had lost what would make an eminent club, yet when I mention, as an accession, Mr Fox, Dr George Fordyce, Sir Charles Bunbury, Lord Offory, Mr Gibbon, Dr Adam Smith, Mr R. B. Sheridan, the Bishops of Kilaloe and St Asaph, Dean Marlay, Mr Steevens, Mr Dunning, Sir Joseph Banks, Dr Scott of the Commons, Earl Spencer, Mr Windham of Norfolk, Lord Elliot, Mr ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... support the cause of Christian truth; Dr. Arnold, the reformer of our modern school system, whom Oxford persecuted during life and honoured in death; and lastly, the clever crotchety Archbishop Whateley, who has not only proved that Napoleon Bonaparte never existed, but that Mr. Gibbon Wakefield's bankrupt schemes of colonization were triumphant successes. Next we come to Merton, the most ancient of all the colleges, founded 7th January 1264. The oldest of its buildings now standing is the library, ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... two in this virtuous age who would 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 ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... personal enmity, could not but concede his extraordinary powers. Lady Mary Wortley Montague reluctantly confessed that 'cousin Fielding' was the greatest original genius of the age; the fastidious Gray was charmed with him; and the more fastidious Gibbon has left his opinion on record, that the illustrious house of Hapsburg, from which Fielding was descended—its name erased, its towers crumbled,—will be forgotten, when the romance of Tom Jones shall flourish in eternal youth. If Coleridge ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... 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 ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... Frederic, peaceful ruler Frewen, free friend Fulbert, bright resolution Faulk, people's guard Gabriel, hero of God Gaius, rejoiced Gamaliel, gift of God Garratt, spear firm Gavin, hawk of battle Geoffrey, God's peace George, husbandman Gerald, spear power Germaine, German Gervas, war eagerness Gibbon, bright pledge Gideon, destroyer Gilbert, bright as gold Gilchrist, servant of Christ Giles, a kid Gillespie, bishop's servant Gillies, servant of Jesus Gisborn, pledge bearer Goddard, pious, virtuous Gedfrey, God's peace Godric, divine king Godwin, divine ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... proofs very rarely indeed have I contented myself in verifying my quotations with comparing them merely with my own manuscript. In almost all instances I have once more examined the originals. 'Diligence and accuracy,' writes Gibbon, 'are the only merits which an historical writer may ascribe to himself; if any merit indeed can be assumed from the performance of an indispensable duty[4].' By diligence and accuracy I have striven to win for myself a place in Johnson's school—'a school distinguished,' as Sir ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... spring afternoon, Claude felt softened and reconciled to the world. Like Gibbon, he was sorry to have finished his labour,—and he could not see anything else as interesting ahead. He must soon be going home now. There would be a few examinations to sit through at the Temple, a few more evenings with the Erlichs, trips to the Library to carry back the ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... background! With the exception of "Charles XII.," a contemporary on whom Voltaire, thanks to eye eye-witnesses, bestows fresh life, also his spirited sketches of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Italians and Germans, scattered through his stories, where are real persons to be found? With Hume, Gibbon and Robertson, belonging to the French school, and who are at once adopted in France, in the researches into our middle ages of Dubos and of Mably, in the "Louis XI" of Duclos, in the "Anarcharsis" of Barthelemy, even in the "Essai sur les Moeurs," and in the "Siecle ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... that bold and daring spirit of liberty, which made England what she is; and the loss of which is now perceived by their surrendered ships, and beaten armies in America. All these things will hereafter be detailed by some future Gibbon, in the History of the Decline and Fall of the ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... were very various. While some of the party would be away sketching, Mr. Osbourne and I hammered away at a novel. We read Gibbon and Carlyle aloud; we blew on flageolets, we strummed on guitars; we took photographs by the light of the sun, the moon, and flash-powder; sometimes we played cards. Pot-hunting engaged a part of our leisure. I have myself passed afternoons in the exciting but innocuous pursuit of ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with such force that Johnson's almost superhuman personality inspired the art of his friends. Of this they were in some degree aware. Reynolds confessed that Johnson formed his mind, and 'brushed from it a great deal of rubbish.' Gibbon called Johnson 'Reynolds' oracle.' In one of his Discourses Sir Joshua, mindful no doubt of his own experience, recommends that young artists seek the companionship of such a man merely as a tonic to their art. Boswell often ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... miscellaneous matter left by British troops when they were stationed on the British Columbian mainland. There was much rubbish on the shelves, but among the rubbish I found many good books. For instance, that winter I read solidly through Gibbon's Rome, and refreshed my early memories of Mahomet, of Alaric, and of Attila. Those who imported fresh elements into the old were even then my greatest interest. I preferred the destroyers to the destroyed, being rather on the side of the gods than on the side of Cato. ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... old alehouse, old almshouses, an old staircase, an old roof or two by the market place, and an old chapel, Lovekyn's, standing apart—the survivals are the loneliest things. Lovekyn's, once a chapel, and now a school, is one of the links. Gibbon was a scholar there, and Gibbon belongs doubly to Surrey; he was born at Putney. But the changes at Kingston have made it almost all new, and the changes have come quickly. Only three or four years ago the quaint, small Harrow Inn had two companions, the Anglers and the Three Compasses, one with ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... despair. To resist was fatal, and it was impossible to fly. On every side he was encompassed with a vast extent of sea and land, which he could never hope to traverse without being discovered, seized, and restored to his irritated master. GIBBON'S Decline and Fall, vol. ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... which is Corneille's great fault. A lady criticised his tragedy, "The Death of Pompey," by saying: "Very fine, but too many heroes in it." Corneille's tragedies generally have, if not too many heroes, at least too much hero, in them. Concerning the historian Gibbon's habitual pomp of expression, it was once wittily said that nobody could possibly tell the truth in such a style as that. It would be equally near the mark if we should say of Corneille's chosen mould of verse, that nobody could ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... the poet was a bad and an ungrateful son. But, 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 him more dear to himself; ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... indifference of Oxford authorities to their duties, as to find in it an admirable illustration of the consequences of the neglect of the true principles of supply and demand implied in the endowment of learning. Gibbon, his junior by twenty-eight years, passed at Oxford the "most idle and unprofitable" months of his whole life; and was, he said, as willing to disclaim the university for a mother, as she could be to renounce him for a son. Oxford, as judged by these ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... longing to play checkers, but talking about books. She discovered that amiable old Dr. Westlake read everything in verse and "light fiction"; that Lyman Cass, the veal-faced, bristly-bearded owner of the mill, had tramped through Gibbon, Hume, Grote, Prescott, and the other thick historians; that he could repeat pages from them—and did. When Dr. Westlake whispered to her, "Yes, Lym is a very well-informed man, but he's modest about it," she felt uninformed ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... commonwealths gazed with admiration on a spectacle which no other country in the world could present. There Siddons, in the prime of her majestic beauty, looked with emotion on a scene surpassing all the imitations of the stage. There Gibbon, the historian of the Roman Empire, thought of the days when Cicero pleaded the cause of Sicily against Verres; and when, before a senate which had still some show of freedom, Tacitus thundered against the ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... and patriarchal group a branch diverges, before the monkey-features are fixed, in the direction of the anthropoids; and this group in turn spreads into a number of types, some of which are the extinct apes of the Miocene, four become the gorilla, chimpanzee, orang, and gibbon of to-day, and one is the group that will become man. To put it still more precisely, if we found a whole series of remains of man's ancestors during the Tertiary, we should probably class them, broadly, as femur-remains ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... 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 ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... and Fall of the Roman Empire. By Edward Gibbon. With notes by Rev. H.H. Milman. Standard edition. To which is added a complete Index of the work. A new edition from entirely new stereotype plates. With portrait on steel. 5 vols., 12mo. Cloth, extra, ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... of which Mr. Sheridan was such a consummate master. But it was on the Fourth Day of the oration that he rose into his most ambitious flights, and produced some of those dazzling bursts of declamation, of which the traditional fame is most vividly preserved. Among the audience of that day was Gibbon, and the mention of his name in the following passage not only produced its effect at the moment, but, as connected with literary anecdote, will make the passage itself long memorable. Politics are of the day, but literature is of all time—and, though it was in the power of ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... Even Gibbon, with all his partiality for whatever was pre- or post- Christian, had indeed no better word than 'elegant' for the ancient mythologies of Greece and Rome, and he surely reflected no particularly advanced opinion when ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... Gibbon refers to this ancient tradition, though not as accepting it for a part of ascertained history, yet in a spirit less sceptical than was usual to him. He writes thus: 'It is supposed that Odin was chief of a tribe of barbarians which dwelt on the banks of the lake ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... Gibbon's Decline and Fall (prejudiced against the Christian Empire, but narrative still unrivalled); Schiller Geschichte der roemischen Kaiserzeit, Bd. ii. (church matters a weak point); ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... statistics of American immigration, see "Encyclopaedia Britannica," 9th ed., s. vv. "Emigration" and "United States." For the facts concerning the Roman Empire one naturally has recourse to Gibbon. From the indications there given we do not get the impression that in the three centuries of the struggle of the empire against the barbarians there was ever such a thirty years' flood of invasion as the immigration into the United States from 1840 ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... preparation), uniform in Size and Price with the Standard Library. It will comprise full and complete Editions of the great Authors of our Literature, including especially those which at present exist only in scarce or expensive Editions. Among the early Volumes will be GIBBON'S DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE, with VARIORUM NOTES, comprising not only all those given in the Original Quarto Edition, but also the Notes of Guizot, Wenck, and other Foreign Editors, as well as whatever has been derived from the later Researches of Niebuhr, Layard, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 213, November 26, 1853 • Various
... growth, all nations in all countries choose and cleave to. 'Slavery,' says Aristotle, 'exists by the law of nature,' meaning that it was everywhere to be found—was a rudimentary universal point of polity. 'There are very many English colonies,' said Edward Gibbon Wakefield, as late as 1848, 'who would keep slaves at once if we would let them,' and he was speaking not only of old colonies trained in slavery, and raised upon the products of it, but likewise of new colonies started by freemen, and which ought, ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... of the decline and fall of the Roman empire. By Edward Gibbon. Abridged. Incorporating the researches of recent commentators. By Wm. Smith, LL.D. ...
— The Nursery, January 1877, Volume XXI, No. 1 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... 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
... Conrad advanced again with Louis as far as Ephesus, 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 ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... pecuniary advantage gained. A little reading, also, as we have seen, sometimes gives an impulse to the mind in the direction of learning and renown. It was the reading of Echard's Roman History, which Gibbon met with while on a visit to Miltshire, that opened before him the ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... 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 belong to the author—his prejudices ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... But then what was the use of an evening to myself when there was no town near, and I had no friends whom I could visit? I did a fair amount of reading, for Lord Saltire let me have the run of his library. Gibbon gave me a couple of enchanting weeks. You know the effect that he produces. You seem to be serenely floating upon a cloud, and looking down on all these pigmy armies and navies, with a wise Mentor ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... "History of the Romans Under the Empire." Merivale's purpose in writing this book was to fill in the interval between the unfinished history by Thomas Arnold and Gibbon.] ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... languishing existence of about six centuries and a half—that is, from the revival of the western empire in 800 by Charlemagne, to the taking of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453—was brought to a close by the death of Constantine Palaeologus, the last of a race who had continued, says Gibbon, 'to assume the titles of Caesar and Augustus after their dominions were circumscribed to the limits of a single city, in which the language as well as manners of the ancient Romans had been long ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... Transoxiana (Turkestan). He is supposed to have been descended 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
... Sallust, and by Lucan, and by Livy, and by Valerius, and Orosius, and other masters of history, who related small as well as great things of the acts and doings of the Romans, I took style and manner from them, though, as a learner, I was not worthy of so vast a work.' Like our own Gibbon, musing upon the steps of Ara Celi, within sight of the Capitol, and within hearing of the monks at prayer, he felt the genius loci stir him with a mixture of astonishment and pathos. Then 'reflecting that our city ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... include 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, ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... a guild of Masters, the degree is the 'step' by which the distinction of becoming a full member of it is attained. Gibbon wrote a century ago that 'the use of academical degrees is visibly borrowed from the mechanic corporations, in which an apprentice, after serving his time, obtains a testimonial of his skill, and his licence ...
— The Oxford Degree Ceremony • Joseph Wells
... direction. Whistler is not to be compared with the great controversialists any more than he is to be compared with the great artists. To set The Gentle Art beside The Dissertation on the Letters of Phalaris, Gibbon's Vindication, or the polemics of Voltaire, would be as unjust as to hang "Cremorne Gardens" in the Arena Chapel. Whistler was not even cock of the Late Victorian walk; both Oscar Wilde and Mr. Bernard Shaw were his masters in the art of controversy. But amongst Londoners of the ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... its political object, the folly of this "revival of the Irish language" would be past belief. The language of Shakespeare and Milton, of Gibbon and Macaulay, ought surely to be good enough for ordinary people; and it must be obvious to every reasoning being that at the present moment of the world's history, English is one of the most useful languages in existence. It is spoken by 40,000,000 of people in Europe and twice that number in ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... 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 compelled to ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... colleagues by his reserved demeanour and seeming want of confidence in them. In December several of the ministers resigned. The strength of parties in the House of Commons was thus quaintly reckoned by Gibbon: "Minister 140; Reynard 90; Boreas 120; the rest unknown or uncertain." But "Reynard" and "Boreas" were now about to join forces in one of the strangest coalitions ever known in the history of politics. No statesman ever attacked another more ferociously than Fox had attacked ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... ("Dictionnaire Historique et Archeologique du Pas de Calais," vol. i, p. 22). The circuit of the present fortifications, about 700 yards square, present to-day the appearance pf the old Roman encampment. "The camp of a Roman legion," writes Gibbon, "presented all the appearance of a fortified city. As soon as the place was marked out, the pioneers carefully levelled the ground and removed every impediment that might interrupt its perfect regularity. ...
— Bolougne-Sur-Mer - St. Patrick's Native Town • Reverend William Canon Fleming
... 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 was at that date filled ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... Parliament-street to the Abbey. Sir Thomas More lived at Chelsea. Addison lived and died in Holland House, Kensington, now the residence of the accomplished nobleman who takes his title from it. In Brook-street, Grosvenor-square, lived Handel; and in Bentinck-street, Manchester-square, Gibbon. We have omitted to mention that De Foe kept a hosier's shop in Cornhill; and that, on the site of the present Southampton-buildings, Chancery-lane, stood the mansion of the Wriothesleys, Earls of Southampton, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... and affecting tribute, written, as it evidently seems, under such solemn impressions, clears the memory of Laura from the imputation of any thing trifling or criminal, while it sufficiently establishes the identity of "a nymph," according to Gibbon, "so shadowy, that her existence has ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... Gibbon was responsible in the first instance for ascribing to the Bulgarians a low moral character. But all the evidence that came under my notice suggested that the ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... uncontrollable grief of a Siamang gibbon who had been taken on board of a homebound English packet, where his owner tempted him with all sorts of tidbits, in the vain hope of calming his sorrow. The gibbon kept his eye on the receding outline of his native mountains, and every now and then made a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... after him. His generous nature showed itself in his opposition to slavery and the slave-trade, and his open sympathy with the American Revolution. His correspondence was large, including such names as those of Benjamin Franklin, Sir Joseph Banks, Lord Monboddo, Gibbon, Warren Hastings, Dr. Price, Edmund Burke, and Dr. Parr. Such a man ought to be remembered, especially by all who take an interest in the studies to which he has opened the way, for he was one who had a right to speak of himself, as he ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... upper shelves, and the sages of Greece and Rome were truly sealed books to her, she could have given a fair account of her Shakespeare and of the Aldine Poets to a judicious catechist, and of many another book with a story besides; even of her Hume, Gibbon, Goldsmith, and Rollin, and of her Scott, perennially delightful. She was, in fact, no dunce, though she had not been disciplined in the conventional routine of education; and as for training in the higher sense, she could not have grown into a more upright or good girl under ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... English, German, and American historical scholars should vote as to who were the two best historians, I have little doubt that Thucydides and Tacitus would have a pretty large majority. If they were asked to name a third choice, it would undoubtedly lie between Herodotus and Gibbon. At the meeting of this association in Cleveland, when methods of historical teaching were under discussion, Herodotus and Thucydides, but no others, were mentioned as proper object lessons. What are the merits of Herodotus? ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... old books. In his love of 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, ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... investigation are exceedingly mortifying to any one who has been proud to call himself a student of History. We had thought, perhaps, that we knew something of the origin of human events and the gradual development from the past into the world of to-day. We had read Herodotus, and Gibbon, and Gillies, and done manful duty with Rollin. There were certain comfortable, definite facts in antiquity. Romulus and Remus were our friends; the transmission of the alphabet by the Phoenicians was a resting-spot; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... disposed of 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
... armoiries, on ne signe point autrement les traites qu'en traceant ces figures." Among the animal totems Charlevoix notices porcupine, bear, wolf and turtle. The armoiries, the totemistic heraldry of the peoples of Virginia, greatly interested a heraldic ancestor of Gibbon the historian,(2) who settled in the colony. According to Schoolcraft,(3) the totem or family badge, of a dead warrior is drawn in a reverse position on his grave-post. In the same way the leopards of England are drawn reversed on the shield of an English king opposite the mention of his death in ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... thoughts, and the public events of their lives, but with themselves—Augustine, Milton, Luther, Melancthon, George Herbert, Baxter, Howe, Owen, Leighton, Barrow, Bunyan, Philip and Matthew Henry, Doddridge, Defoe, Marvel, Locke, Berkeley, Halliburton, Cowper, Gray, Johnson, Gibbon, and David Hume,[23] Jortin, Boston, Bengel, Neander, etc., not to speak of the apostles, and above all, his chief friend the author of the Epistle to the Romans, whom he looked on as the greatest of men,—with all these he had ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... authorities. Still, they have the merit of giving general statements to general readers, of supplying facts in their regular order, and probably, of inducing the multitude, who would shrink from the formalities of Hume or Gibbon in solemn quartos and ponderous octavos, to dip into pages having all the look and nearly all the slightness of the modern novel. At all events, if they do nothing else, they employ the time of pens, which might be much worse occupied; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... Thiers for any knowledge of French history except its stated public facts, its documents with royal seals and its verified dates and details—it is to Dumas, Merimee, Balzac that all but the professional students of history go. We do not seek in the rapid sketches of Gibbon for the story of Nero, but in the pages of "Quo Vadis." Where do we find the breathing history of Spain except in the countless novels that its picturesque subjects have suggested? I would scorn to underestimate the profound and substantial value that the ...
— On the Vice of Novel Reading. - Being a brief in appeal, pointing out errors of the lower tribunal. • Young E. Allison
... one book in favor of God, and another to deny Him; but it is not difficult to see which is his real belief. This perverted philosophy of Voltaire in turn reacted on the English mind, and particularly on history. We see its workings in both Gibbon and Hume. The "little philosophy" which "inclineth a man's mind to atheism," led the eighteenth century philosophers to fancy that Newton's discoveries meant that everything could be attained without religion, and that ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... 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, and will long remain, I hope, with its many memories of war and peace, ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... assembled those heads which live for ever on the canvas of Reynolds. There are the spectacles of Burke and the tall, thin form of Langton; the courtly sneer of Beauclerk and the beaming smile of Garrick; Gibbon tapping his snuff-box and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his ear. In the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought up—the gigantic body, the huge, massy face, ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... 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 Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... it. But a comet is not seen every day; a comet is worth describing: "678.—In this year, the star [called] comet appeared in August, and shone for three months every morning like sunbeam. And bishop Wilfrith was driven from his bishopric by king Ecgferth." We are far from the art of Gibbon or Carlyle. Few monuments, however, are more precious than those old annals; for no people in Europe can pride itself on having chronicles so ancient ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... but has gone carefully through the entire series of the Byzantine writers who treat of the 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 ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... wish for a general notion of the men, and of their time, will find all that they require (set forth from different points of view, though with the same honesty and learning) in Gibbon; in M. de Montalembert's "Moines d'Occident," in Dean Milman's "History of Christianity" and "Latin Christianity," and in Ozanam's "Etudes Germaniques." {17a} But the truest notion of the men is to be got, after all, from the original documents; and especially from that curious ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... individual who at any time filled the office, the very sanctity and privilege of the character with which he was clothed might actually be turned against himself; and here it is, at this point, that the character of Roman emperor became truly and mysteriously awful. Gibbon has taken notice of the extraordinary situation of a subject in the Roman empire who should attempt to fly from the wrath of the crown. Such was the ubiquity of the emperor that this was absolutely hopeless. Except amongst pathless ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... who raised himself by the aid of a faction to the throne of the East, and for twenty years defied attempts to dethrone him, but, being deserted by his party, was taken, subjected to torture, and beheaded in 610. "His reign," says Gibbon, "afflicted Europe with ignominious peace, and Asia ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... a child puts on a man's hat? or what induces us to laugh on reading that the corpulent Gibbon was unable to rise from his knees after making a tender declaration? The usual reply to such questions is, that laughter results from a perception of incongruity. Even were there not on this reply the obvious criticism that laughter often occurs from extreme ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... bridge at Leipsic, might prove a stopper to the pursuing army. There was the making of a good rider in many of them, too; they only wanted ballast, for they knew no more of fear than Nelson did, and would grind over the Vale of the Evenlode and the Marsh Gibbon double timber as gayly and undauntedly as over the accommodating Bullingdon hurdles. And what screws they rode! ancient animals bearing as many scars as a vieux de la vieille, that were considered short of work if they did not come out five days a fortnight. ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... now for Parr's praise or Soame Jenyns' censure? Yet in our Diarist's pages these take equal rank with names that time has spared, with Robertson and Gibbon, ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... a man of magnificent presence, whose air and manner always inspired enthusiasm, soon to be known as Hancock the Superb; Sedgwick, a soldier of great insight and tenacity; Howard, a religious man, who was to come out of the war with only one arm; Hunt and Gibbon, and Webb and Sykes, and Slocum and Pleasanton, who commanded ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... fruitless, and he had reason to write with some bitterness—"Mr. Pitt, I fear, has not much attention to the arts."[609] His neglect of literature and the arts was the more unfortunate because George III and his sons did not raise the tone of the Court in this respect, witness the remark of the King to Gibbon at a State function. "Well, Mr. Gibbon, it's ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... Christians there were also Bishops; and often where Christians differed in other points of doctrine or custom, and made schisms and divisions in the Church, yet did they all remain unanimous in this, in retaining Bishops." So {100} also, the historian Gibbon gives his conclusion as follows: "'No Church without a Bishop' has been a fact well as a maxim since the time of Tertullian and Irenaeus; after we have passed over the difficulties of the first century, ...
— The American Church Dictionary and Cyclopedia • William James Miller
... languages of Western Europe, the once glorious name of Slave has come to express the most degraded condition of men. What centuries of violence and warfare does the history of this word disclose.' [Footnote: Gibbon, Decline and Fall, c. 55. [It is very doubtful whether the idea of 'glory' was implied originally in the national name of Slav. It is generally held now that the Slavs gave themselves the name as being 'the intelligible,' or 'the intelligibly speaking' people; ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... tell them what they had better read; and he, remembering his own maxim, that the greatest prudence lies in concentration, limited himself purposely to a very few. He recommended Shakespeare and Milton of course; Gibbon's "Decline and Fall"; Boswell's "Life of Johnson"; Goethe's conversations with Eckermann and Goethe's autobiography. "Faust" he spoke of in rather a slighting manner; he did not think it possessed the eternal spirit. That so much of a puritan as Emerson should have admired ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... boots had dropped so heavily above Miss Allan's head. Here was the gentleman who, a few hours previously, in the shade of the curtain, had seemed to consist entirely of legs. Deep in an arm-chair he was reading the third volume of Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of Rome by candle-light. As he read he knocked the ash automatically, now and again, from his cigarette and turned the page, while a whole procession of splendid sentences entered his capacious ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... Gibbon, John, brigadier general United States Volunteers, high opinion of volunteers; deficient knowledge of military history; at South ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... Byron's works and Gibbon's Roman Empire and Humboldt's Cosmos, and the bronzes on the mantelpiece, and that masterpiece of the oily school, 'Dutch Fishing-Boats at Sunset,' were fixed as fate, and for all sign of change old Jolyon might have been sitting there still, with legs crossed, in ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Hume, 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 ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Gibbon, son of a Hampshire gentleman, was born at Putney, near London, April 27, 1737. After a preliminary education at Westminster, and fourteen "unprofitable" months at Magdalen College, Oxford, a whim to join the Roman church led to his banishment to Lausanne, where he spent five years, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... 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 the actual prevails. ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... neglect of this canon which makes barren so much work upon the past. Read Gibbon's attempt to account for "why" the Catholic Church arose in the Roman Empire, and mark his empty failure. [Footnote: It is true that Gibbon was ill equipped for his task because he lacked historical imagination. He could not grasp ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... ancients of ours, and we speculate upon them in the present year of grace, as our grandchildren, a hundred years hence, will give their judgment about us. As for your book-learning, O respectable ancestors (though, to be sure, you have the mighty Gibbon with you), I think you will own that you are beaten, and could point to a couple of professors at Cambridge and Glasgow who know more Greek than was to be had in your time in all the universities of Europe, including that of Athens, if such an one existed. As for science, you ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... scandal of the pious Christian, and the fallacious triumph of the infidel, should cease as soon as they recollect not only by whom, but likewise to whom, the Divine Revelation was given.'—Gibbon.[37] ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... me, more suitable to my views, as being less connected with the Government. My first attempts at writing, particularly my Critical Notes on Gibbon's 'History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,' and the 'Annals of Education,' a periodical miscellany in which I had touched upon some leading questions of public and private instruction, obtained for me the notice ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Washington, gave to towns along the way these names: Troy, Rome, Ithaca, Syracuse, Ilion, Manlius, Homer, Corfu, Palmyra, Utica, Delhi, Memphis and Marathon. He really exhausted Grote's "History of Greece" and Gibbon's "Rome," revealing a most depressing lack of humor. This classic flavor of the map of New York is as surprising to English tourists as was the discovery to Hendrik Hudson when, on sailing up the North River, he found ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... interesting. Her father was the Genevese banker and minister of Louis XVI, who failed wretchedly in his attempts to save the finances of France. Her mother, Suzanne Curchod, as a young girl, had won the love of the famous English historian, Edward Gibbon. She had first refused him, and then almost frantically tried to get him back; but by this time Gibbon was more comfortable in single life and less infatuated with Mlle. Curchod, ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... afforded America, Science and Liberty the opportunity of singing in unison. He confesses that this Masque was "to close a drama I had projected on the adventures of Smith in Virginia, in the olden time." Then followed a tragedy suggested by Gibbon, entitled "Attila," but Mr. Barker had advanced only two acts when news came to him that John Augustus Stone was at work on a play ...
— The Indian Princess - La Belle Sauvage • James Nelson Barker
... John Boulton Esquire, of a crime that the law of England calls murder, committed ten or eleven years ago.[100] Yet no indictment has been brought against him, and this confession is attested by James Fitz Gibbon Esquire, a magistrate of this District, and by the Sheriff of this Court. I hold also in my hand the printed history of an outrage of the grossest character, where a number of young official gentlemen in this town assembled together and committed a noonday burglary, by breaking ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... 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 has ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... in London so agreeable that Macaulay would have preferred it at breakfast or at dinner "to the company of Sterne or Fielding, Horace Walpole or Boswell." The love of reading which Gibbon declared he would not exchange for all the treasures of India was, in fact, with Macaulay "a main element of happiness in one of the happiest lives that it has ever fallen to the lot of the ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... thoughtful, and attractive record of the life and works of the greatest among the world's historians, it deserves the highest praise."—Examiner Review of "Gibbon." ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... mankind, there were builders and destroyers. I speculate as to the beginnings of the latter: they cannot be . . . races apart, of some special creation;—made by demons, where it was the Gods made men. . . . "To the Huns," says Gibbon, "a fabulous origin was assigned worthy of their form and manners,—that the witches of Scythia, who for their foul and deadly practices had been driven from society, had united in the desert with infernal spirits, and that the Huns were the offspring of this execrable conjunction." ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... enshrining the records of the Academy of Inscriptions.* (* His papers in that regiment of tomes range over a period of fifty years, from 1746 to 1796. They deal chiefly with Roman history, and especially with points suggested by the author's profound study of Sallust. Gibbon pays De Brosses the compliment of quoting two of his works, and commends his "SINGULAR diligence," with emphasis on the adjective. (See Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Bury's edition 4 37 and 7 168.) He was also Voltaire's landlord at Tournay, ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... Alison, Gibbon and Grote, Motley and Bancroft—but not yet Garneau or Parkman. The lady might have romanced indeed, with glib falseness gilding picturesque invention, and he would ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... Selborne, Izaak Walton, Drummond, Herbert Spencer (only as much of him as I hope I understand and am afraid I do not), Walter Pater, Matthew Arnold, Thoreau, Lewis Carroll, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Hawthorne, Wuthering Heights, Lamb's Essays, Johnson's Lives, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Gibbon, the immortal Pepys, the egregious Boswell, various American children's books that I loved as a child and read and love to this day; various French children's books, loved for the same reason; whole rows of German children's books, on which I was brought up, with their ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... in 1692. It forms the greater part, as, indeed, it was the occasion, of his folio volume, entitled "Historia Inquisitionis cui subjungitur Liber Sententiarum Inquisitionis Tholosanae ab anno Christi Cl[*C]CCCVI ad annum Cl[*C]CCCXXIII." Gibbon, in a note on his fifty-fourth chapter, observes that the book "deserved a more learned and critical editor;" and, if your correspondent will only place the Book of Sentences before the public in ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 2, November 10 1849 • Various
... August, 1787, Gibbon stayed there on his arrival from Lausanne with the completion of his "History," and wrote to Lord Sheffield to apprise him of the fact. In 1802 Isaac D'Israeli, the author of Curiosities of Literature and father of the famous Earl of Beaconsfield, stayed in the hotel after ...
— The Inns and Taverns of "Pickwick" - With Some Observations on their Other Associations • B.W. Matz
... of sea and land, than we begin to discover fossil apes and monkeys north of the Alps and Pyrenees. Among the few species already detected, two at least belong to the anthropomorphous class. One of these, the Dryopithecus of Lartet, a gibbon or long-armed ape, about equal to man in stature, was obtained in the year 1856 in the Upper Miocene strata at Sansan, near the foot of the Pyrenees in the South of France, and one bone of the same ape is reported to have been since ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... whose eternal prance 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 we have most of ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... in the same house with him, and now Mrs. Godfrey undertook to make a match between him and the daughter of a relative of hers. Franklin's account of this affair for its coolness and placidity may almost be compared with Gibbon's "I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son." On learning that the girl's parents could not or would not give with her enough money to pay off his debts, the gallant suitor at once and ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... droves of cattle, or flocks of sheep in the woods, they cut off the haunches of the men and the breasts of the women, and these they regard as great dainties;" in other words they prefer the shepherd to his flock. Gibbon who quotes this passage says on it: "If in the neighbourhood of the commercial and literary town of Glasgow, a race of cannibals has really existed, we may contemplate, in the period of the Scottish history, the opposite ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... United States (think what that means!), it has been judged expedient that the children and myself should remain behind. I am about, therefore, to return with them to the Farm, where I shall pass the remainder of the winter,—how, think you? Why, reading Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," which I have never read yet, and which I now intend to study with classical atlas, Bayle's dictionary, the Encyclopaedia, and all sorts of "aids to beginners." How quiet I shall be! I think perhaps I may die some day, without so much as being aware of it; and if so, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... 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, like so many other benefactors of Chartres Cathedral, ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... Mr. Linwood, his daughter, and her husband, took up their residence for a short time. For more than three weeks, this little party spent their time in visiting the birth-place of Rousseau, and the former abodes of Byron, Gibbon, Voltaire, De Stael, Shelley, ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... Come six miles to Chanyville; then eleven miles to Gibbon; then two miles to John Deacon's where I get dinner and have Nell fed; then twenty miles to Brother Abraham Miller's in Hampshire County, Virginia, where I stay all night. ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... audience, and this is what I saw. It may not be in every detail in complete accordance with the received views of historians, but the marionettes take their history wherever they find it. In this case they found it not in Gibbon but in a favourite legend of the people, and, considering that they depend upon the favour of the people, to take it from that source ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... was likely to equal that of Gibbon both in length and the years necessary to its completion; also that from it could be expected no immediate pecuniary profits, Mr. Knight looked round to find some other way of occupying his leisure, and adding to his income. Although a reserved person, on a certain Sunday when he ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... little to bring her in guilty. Cleopatra, of course, I have taken from Shakespeare. What a wench she was! I could not quite make Julia a queen; but it was impossible to pass over so piquant a character. You will recognise in the two or three ladies of the empire how faithfully I have studied my Gibbon. Poor dear old Belisarius! I have done the best I could with Joanna, but I could not bring myself to care for her. In our days she would simply have gone to Broadmore. I hope you will not think that I have been too strong in my delineations of Henry VIII and his ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... for history, after finishing Rollin I began fingering other works of that kind: there was Whiston's Josephus, too ponderous a book to be held in the hands when read out of doors; and there was Gibbon in six stately volumes. I was not yet able to appreciate the lofty artificial style, and soon fell on something better suited to my boyish taste in letters—-a History of Christianity in, I think, ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... their vengeance on us for that reason. Thanks for the honor, but there is not the slightest connection! Where they did not carry off articles bearing our name, they cut it off, as in the visiting-cards, and left only the first name. Every book of any value or interest, except Hume and Gibbon, was "borrowed" permanently. I regretted Macaulay more than all the rest. Brother's splendid French histories went, too; all except "L'Histoire de la Bastille." However, as they spared father's law libraries (all except one volume they used to support ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... other enactments, we find, curiously enough, a prefiguration of the Forbes Mackenzie Act, in a decree that all taverns should be shut at nine o'clock. In the end of the year he determined on retiring to Perth, where (in the language of Gibbon, applied to Timour) 'he was expected by the Angel of Death.' It is said that, when about to cross the Frith of Forth, then called the Scottish Sea, a Highland woman, who claimed the character of a prophetess, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... opposite 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
... filled with corn and forage, and on the door is inscribed "Magazin des armees." The change is almost incredible to those who remember, that less than four years ago the Catholic religion was strictly practised, and the violation of these sanctuaries deemed sacrilegious. Our great historian [Gibbon] might well say "the influence of superstition is fluctuating and precarious;" though, in the present instance, it has rather been restrained than subdued; and the people, who have not been convinced, but intimidated, secretly lament these ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... at Marseilles and its depopulation, see Henri Martin, Histoire de France, vol. xv, especially document cited in appendix; also Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chap. xliii; also Rambaud. For the resort to witch doctors in Austria against pestilence, down to the end of the eighteenth century, see Biedermann, Deutschland im Achtzehnten Jahrhundert. For the resort to St. Sebastian, see the widespread editions of the Vita et Gesta ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... their country. Those who were destined to the ministry, or to the learned professions, were accustomed to seek an education, if possible, in the German universities, where they would imbibe a taste for any thing but evangelical principles. Rousseau, Voltaire, and Gibbon, during their residence in Switzerland, contributed not a little to the increase of infidelity; and the French revolution seemed to sweep away the landmarks of religion and morality, and to banish whatever might have remained, of the character of Switzerland, from the ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... started for the long vacations, a little group of five would vow that during the summer we would read all of Motley's "Dutch Republic" or, more ambitious still, all of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." When we returned at the opening of school and three of us announced we had finished the latter, each became skeptical of the other two. We fell upon each other in a sort of rough-and-tumble examination, ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... is so long that I can only name a few of the best-known names—Rare Ben Jonson, Cowley, George Herbert, John Dryden, Christopher Wren, John Locke, the two Colmans, Richard Cumberland, Cowper, Gibbon, and ...
— Harper's Young People, April 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... was killed, with Kemper and Gibbon being borne from the field more dead than alive. At last the expected crash came, when infantry met infantry. Pickett's right strikes Hancock's center, then a dull, sullen roar told too well that Greek had met Greek. Next came Davis, then Brockenborro, followed on the left ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... says Gibbon, "mentions a religious madman on the isle of Gorgona. For such profane remarks, Rutilius and his accomplices, are styled, by his commentator, Barthius, rabiosi ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 10 - Asia, Part III • Richard Hakluyt
... than bribes to secure the 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, ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... mutilate, with equal sovereignty of will, the printed pages of a classic and the manuscript of an unknown scribbler,—sit in judgment upon Botta and Laplace, as their predecessors sat in judgment upon Guicciardini and Galileo,—and, in the fervor of their undiscriminating zeal, condemn Robertson and Gibbon, Reid and Hume, the skeptic Bolingbroke and the pious Addison, to the same fiery purgation. That Italian literature was not crushed by them long ago is, perhaps, the strongest proof of the irrepressible vigor and marvellous vitality of the Italian mind. Not to be on the "Index" would ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... man and the ape family is more than offset by structural differences which deny kinship. Alfred McCann in his great book "God—or Gorilla" says, p. 24, "Man has 12 pairs of ribs; the gibbon and chimpanzee, 13; man has 12 dorsal vertebrae; the chimpanzee and gorilla, 13; the gibbon, 14. The gorilla has massive spines on the cervical vertebrae above the scapula"; and, like the other quadrumana (4-handed animals) has an opposable thumb on the hind foot. There are wide differences ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... Lord in a very good humour and kind to me. After dinner to the Temple, where I met Mr. Moore and discoursed with him about the business of putting out my Lord's L3000, and that done, Mr. Shepley and I to the new Play-house near Lincoln's-Inn-Fields (which was formerly Gibbon's tennis-court), where the play of "Beggar's Bush" was newly begun; and so we went in and saw it, it was well acted: and here I saw ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... books, and when they met at the druggist's, as they did every night, to dispute of the inspiration of the Scriptures and the principles of the Free Soil party, the talk sometimes turned upon the respective merits of Dickens and Thackeray, Gibbon and Macaulay, Wordsworth and Byron. There were law students who read "Noctes Ambrosianae," the 'Age of Reason', and Bailey's "Festus," as well as Blackstone's 'Commentaries;' and there was a public library in that village of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... cap. 13. Gibbon observes, that the name of Theodosius, who actually succeeded, begins with the same letters which were indicated in this ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... Stillwater, and greatly respected and loved. He also was the author of those well-known text-books, "The Founders of Islam," and "The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire." This latter work, in five volumes, had been not unfavorably compared to Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." The original newspaper comment, dated some thirty years back, the doctor had preserved, and would produce it, now somewhat frayed and worn, and read it to visitors. He knew it by heart, but ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... throne on the same level with that of the Patriarch, whereas it had formerly been lower; and he prohibited the alienation of fiefs, which would have handed over the patrimony of the knights to the Church, and turned, as Gibbon says, a colony of soldiers into a college of priests. When he died, childless, the next heir to the empire was his sister Yolande, who had married Peter of Courtenay, Count of Auxerre, a member of that princely house which still survives ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... and foregone 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 soundest Protestant ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... as a suitable spot for the conception of a history of the origin, rise, decline and fall of the great maritime Republic, whose dominions, still smiling and populous, surround Ravello on all sides? Gibbon found the first suggestion for his Roman History whilst musing upon the ruins of the Capitol, and he finished his great work in a Swiss garden amidst the scent of acacia bloom; might not the annals of the Amalfitan Republic likewise spring from ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... cried M'Gibbon. "It's all true. Look at the newspapers! It's just your confounded ignorance that sets you snickering. I tell you, it's as much a trade as underwriting, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... papers which gave a history of the Order, describing it as the most ancient in Europe, and quoting the names of eminent men who had won the ribbon of the Order in times past. The Duke of Wellington, Lord Nelson, William the Silent, Galileo, Christopher Columbus, and the historian Gibbon appeared on the list. The Order was next bestowed on an Admiral, who held a command in the South Pacific, and ...
— Lady Bountiful - 1922 • George A. Birmingham
... well as in some degree from that of all previous centuries. Among the authors of this generation whose writings belonged to other departments of thought than pure literature may be mentioned, in passing, the great historian, Edward Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published from 1776-88, and Edmund Burke, whose political speeches and pamphlets possess a true literary quality. The romantic poets had addressed the imagination ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... of the Julian line, a new class of emperors succeeded, by whom the prosperity of the empire was greatly advanced. We have now to fall back on Niebuhr, Gibbon, and the Roman historians, and also make more use of Smith's digest of these authors. But so much ground still remains to go over, that we can only allude to salient points, and our notice of succeeding ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... livre ici pour Monsieur—le voila."—"Ah, ha! Sir John Leach; I see."—"Ah qu'il est bon enfant! qu'il est gai!" exclaimed the garcon. "Ah! qu'il est aimable!" sighed Fanchette—Enter De Molin the banker's little bureau at Lausanne—(by the way, it is the favourite chamber of Gibbon the historian, and if you pay the house a visit from motives of curiosity respecting its former occupant, you will be happy to be allowed to remain and converse with the actual owner, for a more honourable, liberal, and better-informed man, does not exist)—there, I say, in the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 273, September 15, 1827 • Various
... 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 ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... official; you will find public characters freely, flippantly perhaps, and frequently very severely dealt with; in some cases you will be surprised to see my opinions of certain men, some of whom, in many respects, I may perhaps think differently of now. Gibbon said of certain Pagan philosophers, that 'their lives were spent in the pursuit of truth and the practice of virtue.' I cannot boast of having passed my life in the practice of virtue, but I may venture to say ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... letters was indeed one for which the Pope might well use the angelical hymn of praise. "The bishops of Spain,"[210] says Gibbon, "respected themselves and were respected by the public; their indissoluble union confirmed their authority; and the regular discipline of the Church introduced peace, order, and stability into the government of the State. From the reign of Rechared, the first Catholic king, ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... forgive me, it was not with the old trustfulness. He was on the top shelf but one, just in line with the eyes, with gilt front winking in the firelight. I had set him thus conspicuous with intention, because of his calfskin binding, quite old and worn. A decayed Gibbon, I had thought, proclaims a grandfather. A set of British Essayists, if disordered, takes you back of the black walnut. To what length, then, of cultured ancestry must not this Bell give evidence? (I had bought Bell, secondhand, on Farringdon Road, London, ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... the students wait their turn very patiently. To stand and wait while some one examines white discs is soothing. The umbrella will certainly be found. But the fact leads you on all day through Macaulay, Hobbes, Gibbon; through octavos, quartos, folios; sinks deeper and deeper through ivory pages and morocco bindings into this density of thought, ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... time of the Crusades, Richard Cour de Lion, the hero-king of England, became so renowned among the Saracens that (Gibbon informs us) his name was used by mothers and nurses to quiet their infants, and other historical characters before and after him served to like purpose. To the children of Rome in her later days, Attila, the great Hun, was such ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... After November 8, 1660, they acted also in Gibbon's Tennis Court in Clare Market, which they had fitted up as a theatre; see Halliwell-Phillipps, A Collection of Ancient Documents, ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... in London, an old man sat reading Gibbon's History of Rome. He did not put down his book when the postman brought him a letter. He just glanced indifferently at the letter, and impatiently at the postman. Zerviah Holme did not like to be interrupted when he was reading Gibbon; ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... carping at a small statement like this, the Quarterly Reviewer should have made sure that he was quite right. But he happens to be quite wrong. I suspect he got his notion of the manner in which a gibbon walks from a citation in "Man's Place in Nature." But at that time I had not seen a gibbon walk. Since then I have, and I can testify that nothing can be more precise than Mr. Darwin's statement. The gibbon I saw walked without ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... 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
... meaning. Johnson's style has pleased many from the very fault of being perpetually translateable; he creates an impression of cleverness by never saying any thing in a common way. The best specimen of this manner is in Junius, because his antithesis is less merely verbal than Johnson's. Gibbon's manner is the worst of all; it has every fault of which this peculiar style is capable. Tacitus is an example of it in Latin; in coming from Cicero you ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... 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 Brumalia or winter solstice, ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... his son William the Warling.[41] Such seems to be the obvious English shape of Warlencus; but we have a natural curiosity to know what a Warling is, and why William was so called. The name has an attractive sound, and some have seen in it that same approach to a warlock which Gibbon saw to a wiseacre in the surname of Robert Wiscard. We have also a natural curiosity to know whether Duke William really had any good reason for banishing him, and thereby giving the Wiscard another ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... modern writer who has yet undertaken the glorious task, to write a history of the Rise and Progress of the Roman Republic. What a work would eight volumes such as that before us on Hannibal have formed, in conjunction with Gibbon's immortal Decline and Fall! His ardent love of truth, his warm aspiration after the happiness of the human race, his profound and yet liberal religious feeling, as much gave him the spirit requisite for such an undertaking, as his extensive ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... Inhabitants 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
... 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 ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... in our waking hours. Therefore isolement must not be regarded as anything wonderful or mystic, but merely as a day-dream. I admit that this seems at first sight a plausible explanation. Yet I can say with Gibbon, "this statement is probable; but ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... letters. Of these the variety is considerable; and many of their writers are now known. They delight our curiosity by opening new views, and light up in observing minds many projects of works, wanted in our own literature. GIBBON feasted on them; and while he turned them over with constant pleasure, derived accurate notions of works, which no student could himself have verified; of many ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... right to disregard the "settled and satisfactory opinions of the country upon the subject." We could never so appreciate as perfectly to admit the truth of the canon in criticism here involved, and to this day we cannot help agreeing with Gibbon, that "Truth is the first virtue of history." Mrs. George seems to concur with Gibbon and Cooper, and disregarding the poetry and romance woven about the name of Isabella the Catholic, has painted her according to the documents, which by no means warranted ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... has been acquired slowly and quietly, for its own sake, for our own sake, without a thought as to whether it would ever pay at examinations or not. A candidate, after giving most glibly the dates and the titles of the principal works of Cobbett, Gibbon, Burke, Adam Smith, and David Hume, was asked whether he had ever seen any of their writings, and he had to answer, No. Another who was asked which of the works of Pheidias he had seen, replied that he had only read the first ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... unsatisfactory; but it would lead to a most inconvenient length to attempt supplying the deficiency. Those of our readers who are disposed to study this interesting subject, will find it discussed at some length in Mosheim, and there is a good abstract relative to these Oriental sects given by Gibbon, in the Decline and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... student of 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, ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... of the "History of Greece." Altho several histories of Greece have been written since Grote's, his work "still remains in some respects the greatest," says A. D. Lindsay, his latest editor. Grote, in a sense, stands to Greece as Gibbon to the Roman Empire. He depended mainly on the literary sources, archaeology in his day having done little to widen knowledge. His work is therefore defective in its earlier parts, but from the sixth century down, when the literary sources begin, he is "still ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... o'clock, and are lodged for a few days at the Hotel de Courlande. I forgot to tell you that we saw an officer with furred waistcoat, and furred pockets, and monstrous moustache; he looked altogether very like the Little Gibbon in Shaw's Zoology, only the Little Gibbon does not look as conceited as this ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... who is the writer, easy, lucid, and correct, who has not impregnated his writing with something of that personal flavour which we call mannerism? To speak of authors well known to all readers—Does not The Rambler taste of Johnson; The Decline and Fall, of Gibbon; The Middle Ages, of Hallam; The History of England, of Macaulay; and The Invasion of the Crimea, of Kinglake? Do we not know the elephantine tread of The Saturday, and the precise toe of The Spectator? ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope |
