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CHOICE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES.

EDITED BY WILLIAM D. HOWELLS.

"Little Classic" Style.

$1.25 a volume.

This series of the best autobiographies is prepared especially for general reading. Each life is prefaced with a critical and biographical essay by Mr. Howells, in which the sequel of the author's history is given, together with collateral matter from other sources, illustrative of his period and career. In some cases the autobiographies are reduced in bulk by the rejection of uninteresting and objectionable matter. It is designed to include in the series the famous autobiographies of all languages, and to offer in a compact and desirable edition all that is best in this most charming of all literature.

JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO., Publishers, Boston.

MEMOIRS

OF

EDWARD GIBBON, Esq.

Um

WITH AN ESSAY

BY WILLIAM D. HOWELLS.

BOSTON:

JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY,
Late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co.

1877.

1026

COPYRIGHT.

W. D. HOWELLS.

1877.

University Press: Welch, Bigelow, & Co., Cambridge.

EDWARD GIBBON.

HE Muse of History is a worldly personage, who frequently reserves her favors for devotees in easy circumstances. The pushing aspirants who seize the prizes of poetry, fiction, music, the drama, and the other arts, in which genius is required, are apt to be snubbed by this more exclusive lady, whose cult demands long preparation, costly outlays, and ample leisure. She shows to gentlemen of leisure and elegant culture a polite art, one of the very politest, in which industry and perseverance are enough for success and fame, and too often she seems to exact nothing more. A man may not say that he will be a great poet or a great novelist; but with education, money, and time, one may resolve without unexampled presumption to be a great historian. To be sure, this results in many cases in making great historians what they are: greatest when unread, and the most perishable of the inmortals. They have so seldom, indeed, been true literary artists, that one has a certain hesitation in pronouncing any historian a man of genius, and it is with a lasting surprise that one recognizes in the greatest of historians one of the 294792

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