the blind capital (as we call it) of the country-is particularly large and craving; it seeks for some one to devour it, and there is 'plethora '-it finds some one, and there is speculation '-it is devoured, and there is 'panic.' The age of Mr. Gibbon was one of these. The interest of money was very low, perhaps under three per cent. The usual consequence followed; able men started wonderful undertakings; the ablest of all, a company for carrying on an undertaking of great importance, but no one to know what it was.' Mr. Gibbon was not idle. According to the narrative of his grandson, he already filled a considerable position, was worth sixty thousand pounds, and had great influence both in Parliament and in the City. He applied himself to the greatest bubble of all-one so great that it is spoken of in many books as the cause and parent of all contemporary bubbles—the South-Sea Companythe design of which was to reduce the interest on the National Debt, which, oddly enough, it did reduce, and to trade exclusively to the South Sea or Spanish America, where of course it hardly did trade. Mr. Gibbon became a director, sold and bought, traded and prospered; and was considered, perhaps with truth, to have obtained much money. The bubble

was essentially a fashionable one. Public intelligence and the quickness of communication did not then as now at once spread pecuniary information and misinformation to secluded districts; but fine ladies, men of fashion-the London world-ever anxious to make as much of its money as it can, and then wholly unwise (it is not now very wise) in discovering how the most was to be made of it-' went in and speculated largely. As usual, all was favourable so long as the shares were rising; the price was at one time very high, and the agitation very general;

it was, in a word, the railway mania in the South Sea. After a time, the shares hesitated,' declined, and fell; and there was an outcry against everybody concerned in the matter, very like the outcry against the oi Tepi Hudson in our own time. The results, however, were very different.

Whatever may be said, and, judging from the late experience, a good deal is likely to be said, as to the advantages of civilisation and education, it seems certain that they tend to diminish a simpleminded energy. The Parliament of 1720 did not, like the Parliament of 1847, allow itself to be bored and incommoded by legal minutiæ, nor did it forego the use of plain words. A committee reported the discovery of a train of the deepest villainy and fraud hell ever contrived to ruin a nation; the directors of the company were arrested, and Mr. Gibbon among the rest; he was compelled to give in a list of his effects: the general wish was that a retrospective act should be immediately passed, which would impose on him penalties something like, or even more severe than, those now enforced on Paul and Strahan. In the end, however, Mr. Gibbon escaped with a parliamentary conversation upon his affairs. His estate amounted to one hundred and forty thousand pounds; and as this was a great sum, there was an obvious suspicion that he was a great criminal. The scene must have been very curious. 'Allowances of twenty pounds or one shilling were facetiously voted. A vague report that a director had formerly been concerned in another project by which some unknown persons had lost their money, was admitted as a proof of his actual guilt. One man was ruined because he had dropped a foolish speech that his horses should feed. upon gold; another because he was grown so proud,

that one day, at the Treasury, he had refused a civil answer to persons far above him.'

The vanity of his descendant is evidently a little tried by the peculiar severity with which his grandfather was treated. Out of his one hundred and forty thousand pounds it was only proposed that he should retain fifteen [thousand pounds]; and on an amendment even this was reduced to ten thousand pounds. Yet there is some ground for believing that the acute energy and practised pecuniary power which had been successful in obtaining so large a fortune, were likewise applied with science to the inferior task of retaining some of it. The historian indeed says: 'On these ruins,' the ten thousand pounds aforesaid, with skill and credit of which Parliament had not been able to deprive him, my grandfather erected the edifice of a new fortune the labours of sixteen years were amply rewarded; and I have reason to believe that the second structure was not much inferior to the first.' But this only shows how far a family feeling may bias a sceptical judgment. The credit of a man in Mr. Gibbon's position could not be very lucrative; and his skill must have been enormous to have obtained so much at the end of his life, in such circumstances, in so few years. Had he been an early Christian, the narrative of his descendant would have contained an insidious hint 'that pecuniary property may be so secreted as to defy the awkward approaches of political investigation.' That he died rich is certain, for two generations lived solely on the property he bequeathed.

The son of this great speculator, the historian's father, was a man to spend a fortune quietly. He is not related to have indulged in any particular expense, and nothing is more difficult to follow than the pecuniary fortunes of deceased families; but

one thing is certain, that the property which descended to the historian-making every allowance for all minor and subsidiary modes of diminution, such as daughters, settlements, legacies, and so forthwas enormously less than one hundred and forty thousand pounds; and therefore if those figures are correct, the second generation must have made itself very happy out of the savings of the past generation, and without caring for the poverty of the next. Nothing that is related of the historian's father indicates a strong judgment or an acute discrimination; and there are some scarcely dubious signs of a rather weak character.

Edward Gibbon, the great, was born on the 27th of April 1737. Of his mother we hear scarcely anything; and what we do hear is not remarkably favourable. It seems that she was a faint, inoffensive woman, of ordinary capacity, who left a very slight trace of her influence on the character of her son, who did little, and died early. The real mother, as he is careful to explain, of his understanding and education was her sister, and his aunt, Mrs. Catherine Porten, according to the speech of that age, a maiden lady of much vigour and capacity, and for whom her pupil really seems to have felt as much affection as was consistent with a rather easy and cool nature. There is a panegyric on her in the Memoirs; and in a lɔng letter upon the occasion of her death, he deposes: 'To her care I am indebted in earliest infancy for the preservation of my life and health. Το her instructions I owe the first rudiments of knowledge, the first exercise of reason, and a taste for books, which is still the pleasure and glory of my life; and though she taught me neither language nor science, she was certainly the most useful pre

ceptress I ever had. As I grew up, an intercourse of thirty years endeared her to me as the faithful friend and the agreeable companion. You have observed with what freedom and confidence we lived,' etc. etc. To a less sentimental mind, which takes a more tranquil view of aunts and relatives, it is satisfactory to find that somehow he could not write to her. I wish,' he continues, 'I had as much to applaud and as little to reproach in my conduct to Mrs. Porten since I left England; and when I reflect that my letter would have soothed and comforted her decline, I feel' what an ardent nephew would naturally feel at so unprecedented an event. Leaving his maturer years out of the question-a possible rhapsody of affectionate eloquence-she seems to have been of the greatest use to him in infancy.

His health was very imperfect. We hear much of rheumatism, and lameness, and weakness; and he was unable to join in work and play with ordinary boys. He was moved from one school to another, never staying anywhere very long, and owing what knowledge he obtained rather to a strong retentive understanding than to any external stimulants or instruction. At one place he gained an acquaintance with the Latin elements at the price of 'many tears and some blood.' At last he was consigned to the instruction of an elegant clergyman, the Rev. Philip Francis, who had obtained notoriety by a metrical translation of Horace, the laxity of which is even yet complained of by construing schoolboys, and who, with a somewhat Horatian taste, went to London as often as he could, and translated invisa negotia as 'boys to beat.'

In school work, therefore, Gibbon had uncommon difficulties and unusual deficiencies; but these were much more than counterbalanced by a habit which