Word: gibbons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...exhaustive version of the unfinished yet classic work popularly known as Gibbon's Autobiography, edited by Swiss Specialist Georges Bonnard, is now out in the U.S. Bonnard includes Gibbon's notes, his own, and two appendices. Nothing in these pages, however, suggests that Reynolds' portrait was misleading. The alliance of Gibbon and Rome remains one of those successful marriages that amaze by sheer illogic...
Momentary Glow. Gibbon got off to an unlikely start to be historian of anything. Until he was in his teens, he was so frail that his father, Edward Gibbon, gave the name Edward to several succeeding sons-just in case. By his own account, young Gibbon "swallowed more Physic than food," had a "strange nervous affection" in his legs, and was bitten by "a dog most vehemently suspected of madness...
...became a Roman Catholic. His distressed father shipped him to Switzerland, and on Calvin's home ground the conversion was undone. "My temper is not very susceptible of enthusiasm," Gibbon wrote. Yet once Catholicism, which he had described as "a momentary glow of Enthusiasm," had faded, he rekindled the glow for a girl he met during his Swiss exile, Susanne Curchod, destined to be remembered as the mother of the writer and celebrated salon keeper, Mme. de Staël. The glow was not strong enough to survive separation and the disapproval of relatives...
...Gibbon's one ruling passion, contracted at the age of 27, nothing and nobody could cool. In famous words that still move a reader, Gibbon recorded love at first sight of the Eternal City on the evening of Oct. 15, 1764. Yet the gestation period for his great work was strangely drawn out. Three years were frittered away on an abortive history of Switzerland. Finally, in 1772, Gibbon settled down in London with six servants, a parrot and a Pomeranian lapdog to write Decline and Fall. He completed it 14 years later, and his success was immediate though...
...been generations since Gibbon's masterpiece was regarded as definitive. The Greek scholar Richard Person once wittily observed: "Nor does his humanity ever slumber unless when women are ravished or the Christians persecuted." Today's scholars are more likely to complain that Gibbon was weak on the Byzantine and that he was most responsive to Romans like the Augustans, who resembled himself: "Urbane, accomplished, and occasionally a trifle pompous," as Peter Quennell put it in a Gibbon profile. Despite his limits, unpredictably, erratically, marvelously, Gibbon and Rome did go together. "Gibbon is a kind of bridge," Thomas Carlyle...