Volume 20, Number 16 · October 18, 1973
After the Fall
By Hugh Trevor-Roper
The English Essays of Edward Gibbon
edited by Patricia B. Craddock
Oxford, 670 pp., $33.75
Apart from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon published only three distinct works: his Essai sur l'Etude de la Littérature, written in Lausanne, in 1758-1759, at the age of twenty-one, and published in London in 1761; his Critical Observations on the Sixth Book of the Aeneid (1770); and his Vindication of the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of The Decline and Fall (1779). In retrospect, he was not particularly proud of any of these works, all of which were essentially controversial. He refused opportunities to reprint the first of them; he regretted the irreverent tone and 'cowardly' anonymity of the second; and he expressed the hope that the third, having achieved its purpose, would be forgotten. The only work, apart from The Decline and Fall, by which he wished to be remembered, was his Memoirs, which he left incomplete at his death in 1793.
Review, 3134 words
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