library. What defence can be made? None truly, if we are measuring Gibbon by a lofty moral standard; but if we are asking the question now under consideration, how a great historian was to be turned out, we shall have to make a very different judgment.
The obvious reproach is summed up by the statement that Gibbon was a cynic. The name suggests the selfish indifference to human welfare which permits a man to treat politics simply as a game played for the stakes of place and pension. It is generally added, though I hardly know whether it is regarded by way of apology, or as a proof of the offence, that all our great-grandfathers were corrupt borough-mongers, forming cliques for the distribution of plunder, and caring nothing for the welfare of the people. We ought, we are often told, to judge a man by the standard of his period. Whatever the period, it can always be plausibly added that it was the most immoral period ever known in history. The argument is familiar, and I cannot attempt to consider its precise application here. But I may try briefly to indicate how it would have struck Gibbon. What would he have said if he could have foreseen the judgment of the coming
