literary artist, the life of Gibbon was one long sacrifice to the purest
literary enthusiasm. He lived to know, and to rebuild his knowledge in a
shape as durable and as magnificent as a Greek temple. He was content for
years and years to lie unseen, unheard of, while younger men rose past him
into rapid reputation. No unworthy impatience to be famous, no sense of the
uncertainty of life, no weariness or terror at the length or breadth of his
self-imposed task, could induce him at any moment of weakness to give way
to haste or discouragement in the persistent regular collection and
digestion of his material or in the harmonious execution of every part of
his design.... No man who honors the profession of letters, or regards with
respect the higher and more enlightened forms of scholarship, will ever
think without admiration of the noble genius of Gibbon.' It may be added
that Gibbon is one of the conspicuous examples of a man whose success was
made possible only by the possession and proper use of inherited wealth,
with the leisure which it brings.

EDMUND BURKE. The last great prose-writer of the eighteenth century, Edmund
Burke, is also the greatest of English orators. Burke is the only writer
primarily a statesman and orator who can be properly ranked among English
authors of the first class. The reasons, operating in substantially the
same way in all literature, are not hard to understand. The interests with
which statesmen and orators deal are usually temporary; the spirit and
style which give a spoken address the strongest appeal to an audience often
have in them something of superficiality; and it is hard for the orator
even to maintain his own mind on the higher level of rational thought and
disinterested purpose. Occasionally, however, a man appears in public life
who to the power of compelling speech and the personality on which it is
based adds intellect, a philosophic temperament, and the real literary,
poetic, quality. Such men were Demosthenes, Cicero, Webster, and at times
Lincoln, and beside them in England stands Burke. It is certainly an