external circumstance and mental and moral constitution which went to produce this unique result; to observe how dexterously fortune combined all the external elements which were necessary to mould and direct a great historian. Much that looked like misfortune was an essential blessing in disguise; a fact which does not diminish Gibbon's credit for taking the hints in the right way. In his own summary he admits that he has 'drawn a high prize in the lottery of life.' A cheerful temper, equable though not vigorous health, and a 'golden mediocrity of fortune,' are the chief advantages which he enumerates. On the last circumstance he makes an instructive comment elsewhere. Wretched, he says, is the work of the man whose daily diligence has to be stimulated by daily hunger. The author of the splendid eulogium upon Fielding, the friend of Goldsmith and associate of Johnson, should perhaps have admitted that poverty was not of necessity paralysing. Yet it is true that no denizen of Grub Street could have produced such a work as the Decline and Fall, and that with Gibbon's delicacy of constitution life in that region would have been ruinous. A combination of wide research and leisurely reduction of chaotic materials into a well-
