"Gibbon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it, Voltaire would write 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 only true and wide vision could be reached by the senses alone. ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... Edmund," laughed Dora. "You will always seem to be looking right through at the upright sprays, though all the solid weight of Hume, Gibbon, and Rollin is in ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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
... 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 ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of brevity, I will confine my reference to Roman custom to a single pregnant sentence from Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Empire." He says: "In every age and country the wiser, or at least the stronger of the two sexes, has usurped the powers of the state, and confined the other to the cares and pleasures ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... repudiate the idea that history is philosophy teaching by examples, or that an historian has necessarily a greater insight into the problems of the present than any other observant student of affairs. "Gibbon," he once wrote, "believed that the era of conquerors was at an end. Had he lived out the full life of man, he would have seen Europe at the feet of Napoleon. But a few years ago we believed the world had grown too civilised for war, and the ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... seeks both to teach and to move. Our concern is chiefly with De Quincey's second field—the literature of power. In the first field, the literature of knowledge, must lie all history, with Hume and Gibbon; all science, with Darwin and Fiske; all philosophy, with Spencer and William James; all political writing, with Voltaire and Webster. Near that same field must lie many of those essays in criticism of which Professor Dowden speaks. This ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... 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, ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... 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 of a wayward ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... under Haute Ville ("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
... good as the forced stopping-places of travel for reading up the hard, heavy reading which must be done, but which nobody wants to do. Here, for two years, I have been trying to make you read Gibbon, and you would not touch it at home. But if I had you in the mission-house at Mackinaw, waiting for days for a steamboat, and you had finished "Blood and Thunder," and "Sighs and Tears," and then found a copy of Gibbon in the house, I think you would go through ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... 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 Humours ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... length. It would be unfair to treat them as literary criticism, for which he cared as little as it deserves. He was very fond, indeed, of Sainte-Beuve, but almost as much for the information as for the criticism contained in the 'Causeries.' He had always a fancy for such books as Gibbon's great work which give a wide panoramic view of history, and defended his taste on principle. These articles deal with some historical books which interested him, but are chiefly concerned with French and English writers from Hooker to Paley ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... dry as dust. Ernle's writing lives like that of Francis Parkman or Gibbon. Anyone serious about vegetable gardening will want to know all they can about the development ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... of her universities, and cherished a portion of their spirit. From them have sprung the intellectual fires that have, at every crisis of our history, kindled the nation into a new life; from the age of Wycliffe, through those of Latimer, Locke, Gibbon, Macaulay, to the present reign of the Physicists, comparatively few of the motors of their age have been wholly "without the academic circle." Analysing with the same view the lives of the British poets of ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... clear, 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." ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... and Spirrin undertook the business, converting a part of the premises into paint and brass works, which lasted for about four years. Two blast furnaces were built on the spot in 1837 by Edward Protheroe, Esq., who worked them for four years. In 1857 they were purchased by Messrs. Gibbon, and are now ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... in East Lothian, was acted in Edinburgh. This atrocious fact caused much searching of heart in all ultra-evangelical circles. The awful news reached Auchterarder. Meeting in Glendevon Church on May 12, 1757, for the ordination of Mr David M'Gibbon, the Presbytery came to the following resolution:—"The Presbytery, taking into their serious consideration the general fame that a minister of this Church has composed the tragedy of Douglas, and ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... be. Gibbon, Hume, Froude, Parton—Lamb, Johnson, Carlyle—Hugo, Thackeray, Reade, and Trollope—Keats, Shelley, and the rest. What matters the binding? Some time I must read you a passage in good old Christopher North that appeals to me tremendously. ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... 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 also of the conversion of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... was among the plants sacred to Aphrodite, was also appealing to this master poet, who was born this month, as were Wordsworth, George Herbert, John Keble, Anthony Trollope, David Hume, and Edward Gibbon, and who died this month as did Edward Young, who wrote Night Thoughts, and Abraham Lincoln, who freed a race and saved a nation. Who can ever forget the month of Lincoln's death after he has once read that exquisite description of ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... 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, the oldest in England, erected 1377. Wickliff was a student of ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... about the fort, went to the brow of the bluff where the old bastion formerly stood, and while strolling around the home of our childhood were met by General Gibbon, then in command, who, learning who we were and what was our errand, took us to his quarters and showed us much kindness. I told him many things of the old fort which were never recorded, pointed out to him where the stones in the front wall of ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve
... presided that was not doing better and more lasting work. Nothing that Johnson wrote is to be compared, for excellence in its own manner, with Tom Jones or the Vicar of Wakefield or the Citizen of the World. He produced nothing in writing approaching the magnitude of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or the profundity of Burke's philosophy of politics. Even Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose main business was painting and not the pen, was almost as good an author as he; his Discourses ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... distinguished audience. The chief point on which he dwelt was the absolute unity of all the arts and, in order to convey this idea, he framed a definition wide enough to include Shakespeare's King Lear and Michael Angelo's Creation, Paul Veronese's picture of Alexander and Darius, and Gibbon's description of the entry of Heliogabalus into Rome. All these he regarded as so many expressions of man's thoughts and emotions on fine things, conveyed through visible or audible modes; and starting from this point he approached the question of ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... surroundings of the throne. They tell of a camel of silver, life-size, with a rider of gold, and of a golden horse with emeralds for teeth, the neck set with rubies, the trappings of gold. And we may read in Gibbon of the marvelous banqueting carpet, representing a garden, the ground of wrought gold, the walks of silver, the meadows of emeralds, rivulets of pearls, and flowers and fruits of diamonds, rubies, and rare gems. The precious metals ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... recipes and suggestions for novel yet simple "dressings" will be found in Unfired Food in Practice, by Stanley Gibbon.[2] ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... animals, and man's own instinctive cries, aided by signs and gestures. When we treat of sexual selection we shall see that primeval man, or rather some early progenitor of man, probably first used his voice in producing true musical cadences, that is in singing, as do some of the gibbon-apes at the present day; and we may conclude from a widely-spread analogy, that this power would have been especially exerted during the courtship of the sexes,—would have expressed various emotions, such as love, jealousy, triumph,—and would have served as a challenge ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... 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 ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... proceeded as far as Devonshire House, the Duke succeeded in unhorsing his companion, and in the delay that followed his servants made their appearance and rescued him. For this outrage Blood was never punished. Sir Christopher Wren died in St. James's Street in 1723, and Gibbon, the historian, in 1794. The names of Waller, the poet, Wolfe, C. Fox, and Lord Byron, are among the residents. It was here that the last named was lodging when his "Childe Harold" created such an extraordinary sensation. Alexander ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... tone indicating quiet satisfaction. At Gibbon's bench he paused. "Ye'll no pit onything past him, a doot," he said, with a grim ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... made capital of touching "situations," he displayed his own strength of intellect; but, with all this, did not write complete and authentic history. And when analyzed, what was the animus of Gibbon's elaborate chronicle? He "spent his time, his life, his energy," says a severe, but just critic, "in putting a polished gloss on human tumult, a sneering gloss on human piety." And who has not felt, in following Macaulay's animated periods and thorough ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... acknowledges that the structural differences between man and even the highest apes are great and significant; and yet because there is no sign of gradual transition between the gorilla, and the orang, and the gibbon, he infers that they all had a common origin; whereas the more natural conclusion from the facts would be that they had separate beginnings. Mr. Wallace, whose claims are admitted to be equal to these of Mr. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... meadows and woods at Ermenonville. Robespierre, who could not have been more than twenty at the time, for Rousseau died in the summer of 1778, is said to have gone on a reverential pilgrimage in search of an oracle from the lonely sage, as Boswell and as Gibbon and a hundred others had gone before him. Rousseau was wont to use his real adorers as ill as he used his imaginary enemies. Robespierre may well have shared the discouragement of the enthusiastic father ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... 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, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... occupy yourself, indeed you should, my dear. It's no use your attempting your embroidery, for your mind would still wander to him that is no more. You should read; indeed you should. Do go on with Gibbon. I'll fetch it for you, only ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... HUSBAND,—Here we are at Lausanne, in the Hotel Gibbon, occupying the very parlor that the Ruskins had when we were here before. The day I left you I progressed prosperously to Paris. Reached there about one o'clock at night; could get no carriage, and finally had to turn in at a little hotel close by the station, where I slept till morning. ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... preach In strains that Kneeland had been proud to reach; And which, if measured by Judge Thatcher's scale, Had doomed their author to the county jail! Alas that Christian ministers should dare To preach the views of Gibbon ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... surround himself, but at heart a rake. He loved, and had from his youth up, to gamble. 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
... controversy.—It is possible that they may recall to mind my labours for unity. Even those writings, which I published since my calamity, have not been diverted from the same peaceful object." If ever any Protestant divines deserved the reproach cast by Mr. Gibbon,[029] on the first reformers in general, "of being ambitious to succeed the tyrants whom they had dethroned," they were the members of ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... gratified,—expressed by himself before his appointment, or by Gibbon after it,—that the annual tribute might be dispensed with, we should have lost some of ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... university professors. Why hold up Choricius to ridicule? He was no worse than others of his guild. It was not Choricius, it was another Byzantine historian who conveyed from Herodotus an unsavory retort, over which the unsuspecting Gibbon chuckles in the dark cellar of his notes, where he keeps so much of his high game. The Greek historian of the Roman Empire, the Roman historian of every date, are no better, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who has devoted many pages ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... the events of all the centuries, and the history of its interpretation is, as one of its interpreters confesses, the opprobrium of exegesis. But if one ceases to look among these symbols for a predictive outline of modern history, "a sort of anticipated Gibbon," and begins to read it in the light of the apocalyptic method, it may have rich and large meanings for him. He will not be able, indeed, to explain it all; to some of these riddles the clue has been lost; but, in the words of Dr. Farrar, "he will find that the Apocalypse ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... is 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 ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... history. In Prescott, as in Motley, is a wealth of research which fairly bewilders. Nothing is extemporaneous. Archives are ransacked. Moldy correspondence is made to tell its belated story. Certainly Prescott is abundant in information. I do not recall, save in Gibbon's, a series of histories where so much new knowledge is retailed as in Prescott. In seeming looseness of phrase, I have used the term "new knowledge," but these words are happily descriptive of "Conquest ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... published two years subsequently. Here, as elsewhere, Irving has correctly discriminated the biographer's province from the historian's, and leaving the philosophical investigation of cause and effect to writers of Gibbon's calibre, has applied himself to represent the picturesque features of the age as embodied in the actions and utterances of its most characteristic representatives. His last days were devoted to a biography of Washington, undertaken in an ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... for the common progenitors, from which again two branches started—on the one hand the ignoble branches of the catarrhine species of apes, always remaining lower in {44} development, to which also belong the anthropomorphous apes, like the orang outang and gibbon in Asia, the gorilla and chimpanzee in Africa; on the other hand, that branch which represents the ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... murdered by his own son (whom, for the most unnatural act Dante calls his step-son), for the sake of the treasures which his rapacity had amassed. See Ariosto. Orl. Fur. c. iii. st 32. He died in 1293 according to Gibbon. Ant. of the House of Brunswick. Posth. Works, v. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... three 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 ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... one, is a modest and kind man, of a singular character. By the severest economy he raised himself from a carrier into the possession of a comfortable independence. He was always very fond of reading, and has collected nearly 500 volumes, of our most esteemed modern writers, such as Gibbon, Hume, Johnson, &c. &c. His habits of economy and simplicity, remain with him, and yet so very disinterested a man I scarcely ever knew. Lately, when I wished to settle with him about the rent of our house, he appeared much affected, told me that my living near him, and the having ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... Burke by his largeness and breadth. He sent a copy of his History of America, and Burke thanked him with many stately compliments for having employed philosophy to judge of manners, and from manners having drawn new resources of philosophy. Gibbon was there, but the bystanders felt what was too crudely expressed by Mackintosh, that Gibbon might have been taken from a corner of Burke's mind without ever being missed. Though Burke and Gibbon constantly met, it is not likely that, until the ...
— Burke • John Morley
... 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, sixteen or eighteen volumes of a convenient ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... did not believe in the "hereafter," what did they believe in? "Great is your reward in heaven," and similar sentences, lose all meaning without the doctrine of a future life, about which the early Christians were intensely enthusiastic. It was not in this world, as Gibbon remarks, that they wished to be happy ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... that the cry of the Siamang may be heard for miles—making the woods ring again. So Mr. Martin describes the cry of the agile Gibbon as "overpowering and deafening" in a room, and "from its strength, well calculated for resounding through the vast forests." Mr. Waterhouse, an accomplished musician as well as zooelogist, says, "The Gibbon's voice is certainly much more powerful than that of any singer I ever ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... 13. Gibbon observes, that the name of Theodosius, who actually succeeded, begins with the same letters which were ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... consciously against the canons of his time, too often falls into mere pompous mouthing. Shaftesbury, in the previous generation, trying to write poetical prose, becomes as pedantic as Johnson, though in a different style; and Gibbon's mannerism is a familiar example of a similar escape from a monotonous simplicity into awkward complexity. Such writers are like men who have been chilled by what Johnson would call the 'frigorifick' influence of the classicism of their fathers, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... incidental to a farmer's life. The books I read came from the village library, and the task of helping to 'fodder' on the dark winter evenings was lightened by the anticipation of sitting down to 'Gibbon's Rome' or ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... Macaulay till I marveled at the contrast between his great shaggy head and its commonplace surroundings, for in the midst of a discussion of the bleak problems of Agnosticism, or while considering Gibbon's contribution to the world's stock of historical knowledge, certain weather-worn Bavarian farmers came and went, studying us with half-stupid, half-suspicious glances, having no more kinship with Don Carlos Taft than ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... of 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... has certain points in its favor. If you have time and leisure, it is possible to polish and rewrite your ideas until they are expressed in clear, concise terms. Pope sometimes spent a whole day in perfecting one couplet. Gibbon consumed twenty years gathering material for and rewriting the "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." Although you cannot devote such painstaking preparation to a speech, you should take time to eliminate useless ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... add, we should have the books. Where now is the great edition of Bunyan, of Defoe, of Gibbon? The Oxford Press did once publish an edition of Gibbon, worthy enough as far as type and paper could make it worthy. But this is only to be found in second-hand book-shops. Why are two rival London houses now publishing editions of Scott, ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... floor. Every floor of that hotel had its memories for me. In this room lived that brave reactionary officer who boasted that he had made a raid on the Bolsheviks and showed little Madame Kollontai's hat as a trophy. In this I used to listen to Perceval Gibbon when he was talking about how to write short stories and having influenza. There was the room where Miss Beatty used to give tea to tired revolutionaries and to still more tired enquirers into the nature of revolution while she wrote ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... said of Gibbon when his autobiography was published that he did not know the difference between himself and the Roman Empire. I have sometimes thought that the same charge might be levelled against me with regard to effective voting; but association with ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... of the present century, has been thoroughly tamed and cowed by the "fear of Allah and the Consul." And the curse pronounced by the Jews against their brother Ishmael, "his hand shall be against every man," etc., must, as was known even in the days of Gibbon, be taken with many a ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... consulship, and had been accorded the honour of a public triumph. Hadrian, again, was a Spaniard, and Marcus Aurelius a son of Cordoba. No wonder that Spain is proud to remember that, of the "eighty perfect golden years" which Gibbon declares to have been the happiest epoch in mankind's history, no less than sixty were passed beneath the sceptre ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... 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 cavalry, ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... balmy 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 ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... for one thing: and then she wouldn't give away the ribbon to the fastest runner—the lads run a hundred yards to the bride, for ribbon and kiss, you know;—wasn't the ribbon she grudged, poor wench; but the fastest runner in Cairnhope town is that Will Gibbon, a nasty, ugly, slobbering chap, that was always after her, and Philip jealous of him; so she did for the best, and Will Gibbon safe to win it. But the village lads they didn't see the reason, and took it all to themselves. Was she better than their granddam? and were they worse than ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... average is good. Thanks in great part to Gibbon Wakefield's much-abused Company, New Zealand was fortunate in the mental calibre of her pioneer settlers, and in their determined efforts to save their children from degenerating into loutish, half-educated ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... his complete fearlessness in following well-worn convention and his apparent reliance on his readers' ignorance or want of memory, Mr. J. MURRAY GIBBON'S Drums Afar (LANE) would be rather a remarkable book in these psycho-analytical days. His hero actually has the audacity to have blue eyes and fair hair, to start his career in the House, and to end it, so far as the novel is concerned, lying wounded in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... 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 in Caesar's own soul(5) ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... who, as has been said above, made poetry the confidante of all his joys and sorrows, is remarkable. Whoever they were, he was well connected on his father's side at least. 'The nobility of the Spensers,' writes Gibbon, 'has been illustrated and enriched by the trophies of Marlborough; but I exhort them to consider the "Faerie Queen" as the most precious jewel of their coronet.' Spenser was connected with the then not ennobled, but highly influential family of the Spencers of Althorpe, ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 19, 1919 • Various
... celebrated literary club founded by Dr. Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds were Burke, Goldsmith, Garrick, Fox, Gibbon, and Sheridan. Of these Gibbon is not the least distinguished. He is an illustrious example of what an ordinary personality can accomplish by reason of an extraordinary devotion to one purpose. Some few ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... Those old trails that Lewis saw to the south were trails that crossed the Divide south of here. They put the Indians on Snake River waters. These tribes hunted down there. They knew the head of the Red Rock. They knew the head of the Madison. They knew the Gibbon River, and they knew the Norris Geyser Basin, up in Yellowstone Park. It's all right to say the Indians were afraid to go into Yellowstone Park among the geysers, but they did. They knew the Obsidian Cliff—close by the road, it is, and one ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... 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 ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... 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 ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... Walker a mass of periodical literature, papers from New Zealand and magazines from America, and it exasperated him that Mackintosh showed his contempt for these ephemeral publications. He had no patience with the books that absorbed Mackintosh's leisure and thought it only a pose that he read Gibbon's Decline and Fall or Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. And since he had never learned to put any restraint on his tongue, he expressed his opinion of his assistant freely. Mackintosh began to see the real man, and under the boisterous good-humour he discerned a vulgar cunning which was ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... of that 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, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... as a berth in dernier ressort, where a sinecurist may enjoy bed and board at the cost of the state, and as a fair honorario for the trouble of concocting a new scheme for raising the wind, or getting a living. The time may come, and sooth to say, seems drawing near, when Gibbon Wakefield, seated on the woolsack, shall be charged specially with the guardianship of all the fair wards in Chancery. Wo to infant heiress kidnappers, when a chancellor, more experienced than Rhadamanthus, more ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... able ruler of France. Mrs. Browning shares it, I think; only she calls herself cool, which I don't; and another still more remarkable co-religionist in the L.N. faith is old Lady Shirley (of Alderley), the writer of that most interesting letter to Gibbon, dated 1792, published by her father, Lord Sheffield, in his edition of the great historian's posthumous works. She is eighty-two now, and as active and vigorous in body and mind, ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... 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 ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... 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; the destruction of Babylon and the date ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... been putting in. And as a tactful Turk sank the barge containing all my Company's documents sometime in July there is an agreeable shortage of office business. So I am left to pass a day of cultured leisure and to meditate on the felicity of the Tennysonian "infinite torment of flies." I read Gibbon and Tennyson and George Eliot and the Times by turns, with intervals of an entertaining work, the opening sentence of which is "Birds are warm-blooded vertebrate animals oviparous and covered with feathers, the anterior ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... journeyed to Niagara Falls, and having influence with the authorities at 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 on nearing ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... 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, ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... to learn from a book in which the principle of design is for the first time visible. With euphuism, antithesis and the use of balanced sentences came to stay. We may see them in the style of Johnson and Gibbon, while alliterative antithesis reappears to-day in the shape of the epigram. Doubtless Lyly abused the antithetical device; but his successors had only to discover a means of skilfully concealing the structure, an improvement which the early euphuists, with ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... strong hold upon European thought. Leading men in all parts of Europe recognized Sarpi as both a great statesman and a great historian. Among his English friends were such men as Lord Bacon and Sir Henry Wotton; and his praises have been sounded by Grotius, by Gibbon, by Hallam, and by Macaulay. Strong, lucid, these works of Father Paul have always been especially attractive to those who rejoice in the leadership ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... the narrative of 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 ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... waters of Lake Leman, 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
... 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 ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... Yankees, are filled with, and keep up 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 ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... 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, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... will be for books," said Frederick the Great, in his old age. He had hardly looked down into the waters until he got nearly to the other shore. Gibbon declared that a taste for books was the pleasure and glory of his life; and Carlyle, who, it is supposed, was better acquainted with books than any man who has yet lived, declared that of all man could do or make here below, by far the most momentous, ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... them to account. History is apt to forsake you in the scene of it and come lagging hack afterward; and you cannot hope always to have an archaeologist at your elbow to remind you of things you have forgotten or possibly have not known. Suetonius, Plutarch, De Quincey, Gibbon, these are no bad preparations for a visit to the Palatine, but it is better to have read them yesterday than the day before if you wish to draw suddenly upon them for associations with any specific spot. If I were to go again to the Palatine, I would take care to ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... crew, were there also with the old ship Discovery and a large frigate called Resolution, an appropriate name. Button's crew became infected with scurvy, and Port Nelson a camp for the dead. Then came Captain Gibbon in 1614; but the ice caught him at Labrador and turned him back. The merchant adventurers then fitted out Bylot, Hudson's second mate, and in 1615-16 he searched the desolate, lonely northern waters. He found no trace of Hudson, nor a passage ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut
... which consists, we take it, of Merimee, Mme. de Sevigne, Horace Walpole, Byron, and whom else? But in that larger second class, the class of Gray and Julie de Lespinasse, Lady Mary Montagu, Swift, Flaubert, Leopardi, Charles Lamb, Gibbon, Fitzgerald, Voltaire, Cicero we suppose, and a good many more, she is entitled to a place. Jane Welsh, however, is by no means Mrs. Carlyle. She was but twenty-five when she married. Here we find her rather too conscious of her own superiority; not only was she the beauty, she was also the Muse ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... Christian doctrine, locally it permitted pagan practices to be continued under Christian auspices. In the earliest days it set itself against all forms of idolatry and non-Christian practices; in later days, after the fifth century, says Gibbon,[444] it accepted both pagan practice and ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... hope now—all was ended—but the Confederate arms were to snatch a last, and supreme laurel, which time can not wither. Attacked in Fort Gregg, by General Gibbon, Harris's Mississippi brigade, of two hundred and fifty men, made one of those struggles which throw their splendor along the ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... thing, alone among great historians, Mr. Bancroft resembles Gibbon. As an artist he has accomplished that most difficult task of composing a history made up of many separate threads, which must keep on side by side, yet all be subordinate to one main and predominant stream. But his narrative never loses ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... thoughts recurred with a kind of anguished perplexity to some of the problems stirred in him of late by his historical reading. The strifes and feuds and violences of the early Church returned to weigh upon him—the hair-splitting superstition, the selfish passion for power. He recalled Gibbon's lamentation over the age of the Antonines, and Mommsen's grave doubt whether, taken as a whole, the area once covered by the Roman Empire can be said to be substantially happier now than in ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... against the danger that our cosmopolitanism may degenerate into Alexandrianism and that our century may come to be like the age of the Antonines, when a "cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators darkened the face of learning," so Gibbon tells us, and "the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste." It is the spirit of nationality which will help to supply needful idealism. It will allow a man of letters to frequent the past without becoming archaic and to travel abroad without becoming exotic, ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... 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
... most ancient. In the sixth century the dissension between the green (or Prasini) and the blue (or Veneti) was so violent, that 40,000 men were killed, and the factions were abolished from that time. See also Gibbon's ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... the Rise of Islam (1905), in the "Heroes of the Nations" Series, and, by the same author, The Early Development of Mohammedanism (1914); Arthur Gilman, Story of the Saracens (1902), in the "Story of the Nations" Series. Edward Gibbon has two famous chapters (1, li) on Mohammed and the Arabian conquests in his masterpiece, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The Koran, the sacred book of Mohammedans, has been translated into ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... provoking the curiosity of the reader." Finally, good historical works should be read: "Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, and Plutarch among the Greeks; Caesar, Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus among the Latins; and among the moderns, Macchiavelli, Guicciardini, Giannone, Hume, Robertson, Gibbon, the Cardinal de Retz, Vertot, Voltaire, Raynal, and Rulhiere. Not that I would exclude the others, but these will suffice to provide all the styles which are suitable for history; for a great diversity of form is to be met with in ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... and pictorial eye of Gibbon rendered him an incomparable delineator of events; and his powerful mind made him seize the general and characteristic features of society and manners, as they appear in different parts of the world, as well as the traits of individual greatness. His descriptions of the Roman empire ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... other works in general, Balzac informs us that Sainte-Beuve's great characteristic as a writer is l'ennui, l'ennui boueux jusqu'a mi-jambe, that his style is intolerable, that his historical handling is like that of Gibbon, Hume, and other dull people; when he jeers at him for exhuming "La mere Angelique," and scolds him for presuming to obscure the glory of the Roi Soleil, the thing is partly ludicrous, partly melancholy. One remembers that agreeable Bohemian, who at a symposium once ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... off at all in fiction. The record shows that the proportion of readers who cannot even read to the end of a novel is relatively large. These are doubtless the good people who speak of Dickens as "solid reading" and who regard Thackeray with as remote an eye as they do Gibbon. For such "The Duchess" furnishes good mental pabulum, and Miss Corelli provides flights into the loftier ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... the development of mythological science was the rise of the modern critical study of history, begun by Voltaire and Gibbon and carried on by Niebuhr and others. A vigorous group of writers arose in Germany. Creuzer,[1522] indeed, holding that the myths of the ancients must embody their best thought, and falling back on symbolism, cannot be said to have advanced his subject except by his collection of materials; ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... 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 interest ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright
... seldom brushes his wings against the dust or lingers among the humble flowers close to the dust: he does not follow the masters in their entertaining trivialities and fatuities. We remember that even Gibbon interrupts the turgid flow of his spirit to tell us in his Autobiography that he really could, and often did, enjoy a game of cards in the evening. And Rousseau, in a suppurative passion, whispers to us in his Confessions that he even kissed the linen of Madame de Warens' bed ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... naval power," says Gibbon, "that the reduction of Yemen can be successfully attempted"—a remark, by the way, which more than one of the ancients had made before him. All the comparatively fertile districts in the south of Arabia, in fact, are even more completely insulated by the deserts and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... 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 the spirit of a past age. He could not enter ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... their Italian successors are already tracing out a score of Roman traces that it was the Austrian custom to minimise. Captain Pirelli refreshed my historical memories; it was rather like leaving a card on Gibbon en route ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... of matinees extending over two months, Professor William P. Jones danced the whole of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." The first two volumes were danced in slow time, to the accompaniment of two flutes and a lyre. The poses were statuesque rather than graceful, and the gestures had in them a great deal of the antique. But, beginning with the story of the barbarian ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... of literary sons 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
... 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, ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... impersonate all parts. It is the man who never steps outside of his specialty or dissipates his individuality. It is an Edison, a Morse, a Bell, a Howe, a Stephenson, a Watt. It is Adam Smith, spending ten years on the "Wealth of Nations." It is Gibbon, giving twenty years to his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." It is a Hume, writing thirteen hours a day on his "History of England." It is a Webster, spending thirty-six years on his dictionary. It is a Bancroft, working twenty-six years on his "History ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... between Ethics and Theology. The principle of Benevolence in the human mind is, he thinks, an adequate source of moral approbation and disapprobation; and he takes no note of what even sceptics (Gibbon, for example) often dwell upon, the aid of the Theological sanction in enforcing duties imperfectly felt by the natural and ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... [The Assises de Jerusalem were the digest of feudal law, composed by Godfrey of Boulogne, for the government of the Latin kingdom of Palestine, when reconquered from the Saracens. "It was composed with advice of the patriarch and barons, the clergy and laity, and is," says the historian Gibbon, "a precious monument of feudatory jurisprudence, founded upon those principles of freedom which were essential to the system."] A king should tread freely, Grand Master, and should not be controlled by here a ditch, ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... asked for some volumes from the library. He would read, and he sent the faithful and adoring Brome to request Miss Clinker to send him up the third and fourth volume of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." He often turned to Gibbon when he was at war with things. The perfect balance of the English soothed him—and he felt he would read of Julian, for whom in his heart he felt ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... 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
... Clodius (see Langhorne's Plutarch, 1838, p. 498); Pompey's third wife, Mucia, intrigued with Caesar (vide ibid., p. 447); Mahomet's favourite wife, Ayesha, on one occasion incurred suspicion; Antonina, the wife of Belisarius, was notoriously profligate (see Gibbon's Decline and Fall, 1825, iii. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... produced by the abduction of a Miss Turner from Miss Daulby's School, on the West Derby-road, by Mr. E. Gibbon Wakefield. This is the white house that stands retired a field distant from the road, on the right hand side, about a quarter of a mile beyond ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... Gibbon's celebrated Fifteenth Chapter," he said later, "and I don't see what Christians found against it. It is so mild—so gentle in its sarcasm." He added that he had been reading also a little book of brief biographies and had found in it the saying of Darwin's father, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... elaborate songs, thinly accompanied, and separated by stretches of dreary recitative. But in those days persons of culture, in England as well as in Italy, were perhaps more interested in ancient history and in the history of the later Roman Empire than they are now; it is significant that Gibbon's Decline and Fall made its appearance just when the fashion for operas on subjects which might have been taken from its pages was coming ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... of the Jewish sects, and so pure in its spirit that St. Jerome ranks its best-known writer as a Christian,—a philosophy which taught men to consider virtue as the only good, vice as the only evil, all external things as indifferent. "His life," says Gibbon, "was the noblest commentary on the precepts of Zeno. He was severe to himself, indulgent to the imperfections of others, just and beneficent to all mankind. He regretted that Avidius Cassius, who had excited a rebellion in Syria, had by a voluntary death deprived ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... monkey race in their glory, however, they must be seen in their native woods, where they dwell in genteel independence, enjoying their entailed estates and living on their own cocoa nuts. There will be found the Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall when yielding the Palm to some aspiring rival is swifter than that of the Roman Empire; the Barberry Ape, so called from feeding exclusively on Barberries; the Chimpanzee—an African corruption of Jump-and-see, the name given to the animal ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, Issue 10 • Various
... The Story of Britain, The Journey (that's Sterne's), The House of Seven Gables, Carroll's Looking-glass, AEsop his Fables, And Leaves of Grass, Departmental Ditties, The Woman in White, The Tale of Two Cities, Ships that Pass in the Night, Meredith's Feverel, Gibbon's Decline, Walter Scott's Peveril, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... Gibbon's twenty years' fag and toil on the materials of the History of the Roman Empire alone, and at a time when there were many aids not existing in Raleigh's day. Gibbon personally ransacked the libraries of Europe. Raleigh had scarcely four years to cover the four most ancient ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... him all day, with a two-hour interval every afternoon and an evening to myself upon Fridays. 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 ever at ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... prospect of a compromise with Jeffords about the tract in Dallas, and he is to meet Wharton and myself at your law-shop to-morrow. It is important to make an arrangement with Jeffords—his example will be felt by Brownsell and Gibbon. We may escape a long-winded lawsuit, after all, to your great discomfiture and my gain. But you ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms |
