HI STORY TODAY

Historians and their Times

EdwardGibbo1l

11737-94);portrait II.'! Henry

Walto/!.

in the march of the modern mind.Nor, for many readers, does G ib­

bon even cut a very attractive figure .Squa t and ugly, this vain and self­regarding man full of fussy bachelormanner isms hardly matches theRomantic ideal of the in tellectua l ashon est doub ter or unworldly truth ­seeker. Ind eed , the landmarks of hislife, recounted in his Memoirs with acomplacency heighten ed rath er thand ispe lled by his habit ual self-irony,eas ily induce repugn an ce throughtheir com bina tion of the gro tesqueand the un d igni fied . Isn 't there so me­th ing bizarre in the image of the fatand foppish G ibbon se rving for twoyears as a captain of the Hampshiregre nadie rs, something un heroicabo ut G ibbo n's career as a Member ofParliament, during wh ich he neverope ned his mouth, merely waddlingloya lly through the govern ment vot­ing lobbies in return for his £800 a yearas a placeman at the Board of Trade(and this from a champion of politicalinde pendence and a flayer of 'corrup­tion' )?

Certainly Gibbon had a calculating

called 'cor pulent volum es' such ashis, runnin g to nearly a million and ahalf words. In any case, the idea ofRom e - its empire, its Church, itsgrandeur - no longer excites in us thatmingled reverence and repulsionwhich fascina ted th e Aug ustans or,for that ma tter, th e Victori an s.

Furthe rmore, tod ay's academics feellittl e kin ship with him . G ibbo nfou nd ed no historical schoo l, bred noge ne ra tio ns of di scipl es , andpioneered no drama tic breakthrough sin historical method . Nor did he evenmake a grea t mark on phil osophy.Un like his grea t French contempo raryVoltai re, Gibbon didn't preach boldtheor ies of man a nd socie ty or wieldhi s pe n to cha nge th e world .Altho ug h utt erly in sy mpathy withthe mind of the Enlightenment, andaiming to be a plrilosophical histo rian,Gibbon saw himself first and foremostas a scholar. Indeed, his first book wasa defence of the profound research esof les erudits (learned scho lars) aga ins tthe flashy superficialities circulatingin Parisian radical chic circles . Gibbonthus resists being pressed for se rvice

'Prudence before passion ' - Gibbonmay have been a man of his time but hewas also master of his craft in deployingfacts to show history (through themedium of the Roman Empire) as self­generating and self-explanatory.

Roy Porter

H AVE WE SEEN THE DECLINE ANDfall of Edward Gibbon? What stand­ing does his lifework carry toda y?Faced with such qu estion s, historian sand histor y read ers alike may feelembarrassed . Surely Gibbo n is stillBritain's most renowned master of thecraf t - can there indeed by any wor k ofhistory with a title more famous thanTile Decline and Fall of the RomanEmpire? Yet , as Sir Ge offrey Eltoncorrec tly poin ts out, 'hardly anyoneread s [himIany longer ', a fact whi ch inElton 's eyes effectively sea ls his fate,given that ' readability is [his] mainclaim to fame '. In other words, forElton and , one suspec ts, for man y oftodays academics, G ibbon's icon nolon ger occu pies the high altar in thepantheon of historical scho larship. 'Tothe historian ', Elton writes, ' the greatEnglish historians a re Mait land andNamier .

Since, as a religious sceptic, Gib­bon 's only hope of imm orta lity lay inthe fame of his book, this eclipse isdrastic. It is, however, not hard toexplain . Tod ay's reading pu blic is notgiven to poring ove r wh at Gibbon

GIBBON,THESECULARSCHOLAR

46

turn . As a young man in Lausanne, hefell in love with Su zanne Curchod; hisfather objected - an opposition whichcould wreck his financial prosp ects.Discretion proved the better part ofvalour. 'I sighed as a lover, I obeyed asa son', he recalled in his Memoirs:clearly the son knew already how toput prudence before passion.

And even when Gibbon had thecourage of his convictions, his tonemay annoy as much as his mindimpresses. Tak e the notoriousaccount of the victory of Christianityin chapters 15and 16 of the DeclineandFall. Few would den y the power of h isanalysis of the socio politics of faith.Bu t many have qu estioned whethersuch glib terms as 'enthusiasm' and'su perstition' really shed mu ch lighton religious experience and regretthat he waged his campaigns againstreligio n by sneer and innuendo. Isn 'tVoltaire 's o u t rig h t ca ll , 'ec raserl'iniame' , more appealing tha n the cyn­icism of one who jeered at the Ch ris­tian s but religiously attended churchfor form 's sak e, and to polish up hisGreek? And anyone hoping to find inGibbon the model of a modern radi calis bound to be disappointed by hisuncomprehending denunciatio ns ofthe 'new barbarians' of the FrenchRevolution, an event he neitherunderstood nor showed the slightes tsympathy for.

So is there any reason wh y wesho uld still take Gibbon serious lv?Gibbon certainl y did, enterta ining anexalted vision of his own mission as' the histor ian of the Roman Empire'.'From ea rly yout h ', he writes, '1aspired to the cha racter of an his­torian', and eve n before pu blication he

was referr ing to 'my grea t work '. It isentirely in character that he believedhis own life his tory was equally worth'delivering to the world ', writing nofewer than seve n drafts of hismemoirs of the artist as a younghistorian. Yet if (as Professor Eltontells us) Gibbon lived in historio­graphy's 'prehistoric age ', isn't con­tinuing ad miration for him misplaced ,smacking of pre cisely that 'superstiti­ton ' which Gibbon deemed so con­temptible in the vu lgar?

No t so! For, as an y reading of thatmagisterial narrat ive tracing thirteencenturies of human dest iny acro ssthree con tinents will confirm, Gib­bon's achievemen t in deploying somuch learning, with com ma nd ,ins igh t and accuracy, is quite monu­mental. It was an accomplishmentmatched , but certainl y not excelled ,by at most three or four other his­torians of that cen tu ry whi ch contri­buted so greatly to man's understand ­ing of him self as the child of time . As aglance at the feeble ripostes to hisbook will show, Gibbon was a gian t ina land of histor ica l pygm ies. We stillrespect the contributio ns of the Scots,Robertson and Hume, and the French­men , Montesquieu and Voltaire, tomodern historiog raphy. But Gibbonexcepted , how many other Englishhistorians wh o were Gibbon's con­temporaries can we even name ?

So in wh at precise ly lies Gibbon'simportan ce as a historian? First andforem ost , he was a master of all facet sof the historian 's craf t. His techni­ques, it is tru e, were essentially tradi -

t\ III recherche du temps perdu '. Canateuosl'ision of the ruins of Rome, sllowing theColosseu m awl tile Arch ofCmlstanthzc.

5F.rTF. MHER. NI:ito

tionaI. Whereas nineteenth-centuryhistorian s were to pen etrate thehith erto dark continent of manuscriptarchives and to turn archaeology intoa tru sty se rvant, Gibbon stuck toprinted sources - the histor ian s ofRom e, the Chu rch Father s, th emedieval ch roniclers, cha rters, legalcodes , inscri ptions . Yet during thetwenty years he laboured on theDecline alld Fall , he achieved a match­less mastery of the philological, his­tor ical and textual scholars hip pro­d uced by the nob le line of eruditsru nning from Scaliger up to Mont­fauco n, 'honest' Tillemont (who hadcollected the sources for the first sixce n tu ries AD) and ' the learnedMuratori', who had published theso urces of medi eval Italy. Gibbonvalued these scholars as fellow free ­masons of the mind and accordedthem the adrniration - and occasionalchidings - which were their d ue. Buthis vision stretche d far beyond theirantiquarian minu tiae , be yon d theepigraphy, chronology, an d geo­graphy in whi ch he made him selfexpe rt. .

For Gibbon aimed to do more thanp reserve the dr y bon es of the past;through the art of interpretation, heresurrected it. To this end, he mas­tered his texts, collated and comparedthe m, assesse d bias, pinpointedinconsistencies and errors, and thenabove all, synthesised a multitude ofsources into a wh ole wh ich was atonce a superlatively planned andpolished na rra tive and a coge ntin terp retation. Of course, his swipesagai ns t 'priva te judgeme nts ' no twit h­sta nding , Gibbon's epic incorpora tedper sonal prejud ices - it was a readi ng

HISTORY TODAY

in fact of how the Roman Empire hadfallen 10 'barbarism and Christianity '.

Yet thi s was an interpretation sup­ported at the foot of every page by afoundation of learned footno tes, chal­lenging det ractors to surpass his erud ­ition , And Gibbon's citations ofsources were invariably accurate andjudicious, As William Rober tson ack­nowled ged , ' I have traced Mr Gibbonin many of his quotations (for experi­ence has taught me to suspect theaccuracy of my brother penmen), andI find tha t he refe rs to no passage butwha t he has seen with his ow n eyes',How many of us 'moderns' can swearto mee t the standa rds Gibbon se t?Even in the pages of Humc, the linksbetween evidence and interpretationoften lie hidden. Gibbon by contras tes tablished norms for professiona lcon d uct whic h remain exemplary forscholarship today.

Thus it borders on travest y to saythat ' readability' is Gibbon's 'mainclaim to fame ', Doubtless Gibbon wasa cons umma te stylist. But it is all tooeasy to be bewitched by those majesticpe riods, those studied an tithe ses,that grave irony, and to conclude ,condescend ingly, that as a ma n of theAugus tan age , Gibbon refined historyas an art, leaving it to his successors topioneer its 'science', For Gibbon wasno dilettan te . He was a dedicated ,even a passionate, scholar. Though norecluse, he was mos t at home in hislibra ry (his 'seraglio '), he kep t hismornings sacred for work, and - asfriends and family found to their cos t- he cou ld be quite ruthless in putting'my great work' first.

The Decline and Fall is ind eed atr ibute to immense labour, Its ultimateroots lay in a childhood spent poringover the chronologies of the Assy­rians; it was ins pired by Gibbon's visi tto Rome in 1764; over a decad e thenelapsed befo re the first volume sawthe ligh t of day, and the wh ole opusoccupied Gibbon for fu lly twodecades, Hume and Voltaire foundtime for history amongs t their othercontributions to letters . But it is toGibbon that we must look for historyas a vocation, and for renewed confi­de nce tha t history could stand as anindependent body of tru th . For thecrit ical scholarship of Bayle andothers had cast dark doubts upon thepossibility of an y historical discipline,Facin g s uc h s ce p t icis m, th eEnlightenmen t turned to 'con jectural'or 'philosophical' panoramas, de duc­ing man's past from speculation ratherthan building it piecemeal from therecords. It was Gibbon's triumph todemonstrate by example that thesweep of human history could be

(Be/ow):Misrepresentation . . .lnamtracy . . .plagiarism' - twocontemporary clericalreuiews attacking.Decline and Fall'.

.. 'The Luminoushistorian' - this 1788caricatureof Gibbonechoes Sheridan's crack

. 'luminous! oh, 1mean tvolumi,lOus' about him,made at tl,e trial ofWarren Hastings.

TI,e pavilion of Gibbo,t'shouse in Lausa,rne,wherehe wrote 'Decline

I alld Fall:

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G 1 B ~ 0 N" HI S T OR Y,Mr. I

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48

of the Roman Repu blic had lain in itsvas t citize n ar my, which harmonisedpolitica l and military will and ,through en suring maxim um politicalpa rticipa tion, p reven ted te nsi onsbetween social rank s subverting thecommonwealth . So long as the ar myide ntified wi th the sta te, publicmorale rema ined high .

Gibbon's genius was to show howsuch strength inevitably generated itsow n deca y. Rome was the victim of itsown success (' the decline of Rome wasthe natural and inevitable effect ofimmoderate greatness'). The more theRep ublic expa nded, the greater thesp lits bet ween the leade rs of theincreasingly mercenary armies andthe sena torial, poli tical cad res. Theadventurism of Pom pey and Caesa rled to Aug ustus and the Empire, andthe imperial rule of one man (evenwhen 'moderate') fur ther sappedpublic spirit, de stroying as it we nt allbut the charade of a free constitution .Initia lly this concen tra tion of powermade the emperor master of the army;then it made the army master of theemperor, ushering in chaos untilfinally all vestiges of political life wereended in the levellin g 'despotism ' ofDiocletian , an a utocracy soo n to bemade all the more ab solu te byConstantine's conversion, w hichyoked one God to one emperor andestablished the se rvile and sterileByzan tine theocracy. Having enslavedthe world , the Romans ens lavedthemselves.

Rome decl ined through moral cor­ru ption: the naked ambition ofemperors and ar mies , the ' luxury' ofapathe tic pa tricians strip ped of publicd uties , the fanaticism of Christians forwhom private salvatio n mean t all. ButGibbon did not deal out crass moral

convincing ly reconstructed from thewritten remains.

For Gibbo n, history just ified itself;or, to put this ano the r way, it was notthe handmaid of theology. This con­stitutes Gibbon's second grea t con ­tribution to history. For until thenpractically all history conceived on thegrand scale ('u niversa l history' ) hadaimed to justi fy God 's ways to man ,find ing meaning in human affairsthrough tracing the div ine han d andmind . From Eusebi us and St Augus­tine, th rou gh Sir Walter Raleigh's His­lory of the World an d Bossuet's HisioireUn iverselle, and up to Gibbon's ow nday, the historian 's business had beento ch ronicle Providen ce, to reconcilethe Scrip tures with the annals of othe rcivilisa tions, to dem on strate the ful­filment of proph ecy, and to project theDivine Plan with an eye to the presentand the fut ure . It was just such sacredhistories which Gibbon had devouredduring his sickly youth . Indeed, it washis respo nse to one key problem suchhistories tackled - wh en precisely didmiracles cease? - wh ich precipitatedhis head stron g, and temporary, con­version to Roman Catholicism at theage of sixtee n.

Gibbo n's history stepped outsidethi s holy circle. His onsla ught againstreligion did n't me rely expose theolog­ical sophistries and the ambitions toplan t the Cross on the Capitol. Rather,he tu rned traditional histories on the irhead , or more pro perly, on their feet.Human history was not a divinepuppet -theatre . On the contrar y, thehistory of religion had to be see n as anexpression - indeed, an aberration ­of the history of man. His was (sta tedGibbon) an 'enquiry into the llllllla"causes of the progress and estab­lishment of Christia nity ' .

In no way did Gibbon's switch ofviewpiont mark a de mo tion for relig ­ion . The last th ing Gibbon was, bo thas a man and as a historian, wasind ifferent to religion . Perman entlyscarred by his teen age conversion andhis consequent five years' exile inLausan ne, he rem ained di strau ght allhis life at en thus iasm's power to per­vert the lives of indivi dua ls andsocieties alike . Yet such possessionwas to be understood , Gibbo ninsis ted, as the work not of Provi­de nce bu t of human natu re and socia lcrises - the force of religion was equi­valent to, but even more deadl y than ,the force of arms or money.

Thus the meaning of the past nolonger lay Beyond; his tory was not theindex of Higher Powers, bu t self­gene rating an d se lf-explana tory. Byhis actions in socie ty, ma n made andmarred himself. 'Men make their ow n

SFJ'TEM.HER. I~

Voltaire in silhouette, bv Jean Hubert; another of Lausmme's inhabitants in tile mid-eigllteenthcmlllry, Voltaire provided the rallying cry for t nlig/ltePI metlt attacks on superstition with hisfamou s 'ecraser r infame'.

history', Gibbon might have an tici­pated Marx in saying- and well mighthe have added, ' though not un dercircumsta nces of thei r own choosing'.Th us , at Gibbon's ha nd s, the Augus­tin ian idea of the Fall makes way foran Augu stan d read ofcorruption, andthe millenium is sec ularised into theidea of progress.

Of course, there was little abso­lutely nove l in Gibbon's secular visionof historical cycles in which peoplesrose and fell through the laws of theirown creative and destructive ener­gies. Such out loo ks, familiar sinceMachiavelli, had later bee n refined byMontesquieu and othe rs; and allder ived , of course, ultim ately fromGibbon's favourite ancient historian ssuch as Tacitus . The nove l twist Gib ­bon added was to inco rpora te thehistory of Christianity itself withinthose secular orbits .

But how was history, thu s secular­ised, to make sense? No divine plan,no single person, con tro lled the tidesof eve nts. Rathe r human affairs werethe outcome of the balan ce of mul ­titudes of forces, wh ose dynam icinterplay cons tantly produced newconfigu rations, eac h of wh ich in turnblosso med , decayed and reformed . Afrank realist , Gibbo n had no illusionsabout the role played by the swo rd .Peoples rose and disa ppeared accord ­ing to an almost Darwinia n law of thesurvival of the fittes t. Rome's great­ness was built upon military conquestachieved d ur ing the Republic andmaintained under the Empire untilsuch time as the 'deluge of barbari an s'overwhelmed the e terna l city th roughirresis tible milita ry might.

He nce, the key to history lay largelyin grasping wha t ma de for successfulmilitary power. The uni que strength

49

H1STO KY TO DAY

judgeme nts; his achievement wasrather to explore the ambig uo usdialectics of movem ents and moral s,attitudes and actions . History wasneithe r mere 'sound and fury, signify­ing no thing', nor jus t a morali ty playof sa ints and sinners . Rather itrevealed the sociopolitical condi tion sof the health of nations.

And as su ch, it sho uld also serve asa tract for the times, teach ing 'civilp rudence'. The past, with its legaciesand lessons, was relevant , exemplary.Hence Gibbon's fascination, as a his­tor ian , with the dilemmas of his owntimes, indeed, those focused throughthe prism of his own existence . Bornin 1737 into an 'honourable and weal ­thy fam ily', G ibbon harboured norom antic fanta sies about the springsof happiness. Well-being sp rang fromindependen ce, and in turn such lib­erty (' the firs t wish of our hea rt ')ne cessarily presupposed wealth .Before the timely death of his spe nd­th rift father saved him 'from a hope­less life of obscurity and indigence',G ibbon personally felt the misery ofbeing dep endent upo n arbitrary will,the threat relative penu ry posed to hisow n en joyme nt of life : desp oti cfathers and despotic empires we reequa l da ngers to human wellbeing.

Yet mllld prosperity and liberty bebed fellow s? That was the great prob­lem over whi ch Enlightenme nt theor­ists agonised. The Roman tic strain ofthou ght, exemplified by Roussea u,thought it an impossible marriage (forwealth brou ght wea kness not free­dom ) and opted for liberty. Gibbon,however, had no sympa thies for suchparl ou r pr imi tivism . Instead , heso ugh t to explore throu gh concretehistorical experience how a free con­stitution, those adva nces in trad e andmanu factures w hich guaranteedpros perity, and the Slimmum bonum ofperson al libert y could p ractically beun ited - thou gh of course not perma­nently - in a regime blessed with theright political machinery and publicspirit. The first two centur ies of theRom an Empire forme d the closestapproxima tion to that happy condi­tion, combining 'o rde r, regu lari ty andrefinement'. Ultima tely, of course,theocra tic despoti sm had de stroyedpublic liberty. Yet so long as impe rialpowers were deployed wi th modera­tio n , as the y we re unde r theAn tonine s. and so lon g as theremnants of the rep ub lican politysurvived, Rome could be trul y great: ' Iam convinced there neve r existedsuch a nation ' . But Gibbon immedi­ately added , ' I hope for the happine ssof mank ind there never will again' .

O n that score, indeed, Gibbon wa s

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'AIlOt'lt renown and disciplinedvalour';Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher f11ll'en)r(161-18U AD), sun'eys the aptltheosis of Romein Gibbcm's Golden Age of An tonine rule.(Below) 'BelOi'ed and God' - A"ti,IOIIS,f",'Ourite of Hadrian (117-38); his death ill130spaw1lt'd a clllt of statues and busts.

opnrrusnc, For the progression fromruden ess to refineme nt whi ch thevictorious barbarians had undergoneover the med ieval centurie s had leftGibbon's Europe the antithesis of auni ted theocrat ic emp ire. Instead itwas a jigsaw of rival states , wh osevery rivalries see med to promise thatb le n d of p at ri o ti s m , lim it e dsovereign ty and balan ced cons titu­tion s favourable to freedom; of mater­ial progress there could be no do ubt.History's verdict looked promising:

We may thereforeacquiesce in the pleas­ing conclusion that every age of theworld has increased, and still increases,the real wealth. the happiness andperhaps the virtue of the human race.

run the closing words of Gibbon'sepic. Just two years later, however, theoutb reak of the French Revolu tionwas lead ing him to speak of the 'Gallichyd ra' of the 'new Barbarians'. In hishistory of how the Roman Empire hadbeen over-whe lmed by a 'barbaricdeluge ' from without, he had littleneed to dread the barbarians within ,

SEI'TE.\ lHER, 1<r.oIn

The Old and theNew

The ne w town of Telford, so na me d in196B, includes wi thin its bounda ries lron ­bridge, ' the cradle of the industrial revo lu­tion'. There is no oth er ne w town withsuch a unique h is toric heritage . As a result- and as a result also of the imagina tiveactivities of the Iro nbridge Gorge Tru st ­thou sa nds of visitors, some of them chil­dren, some of them kn owledgeable abou tind us tr ial hist or y and archaeology, a reattracted eac h year to Telford . They are thenatural su ccessors to the en chanted vis­itors to Coa lbroo kda le in the eigh teen thcentury wh o found far more to see thereth an Telford 's new iron bridge , the first inthe world, built in 1779.

If the new town had been nam ed Daw­ley, as it was when it was first designa tedunder the New Towns Act ofI9~6, it mightwe ll have had less na tiona l impact. Yet itco ntains within its boundaries not onlyexceptional natural beauty as well as his­tor ic heritage, but acres of ravaged land,ano ther by-prod uct of in dustrial his tory;and whil e it is now most appropria telyna med after a grea t pioneer of technicaland economic p rogress, th e industri es onwhich its first hopes were based colla pseddurin g the 1960s and 1970s. Already it wasagreed to be 'on the sick list ' when it wasgiven its new na me, and at present it hasan exceptiona lly high unemploymentrat e . Hopes tha t the unemploym ent willnot become chronic in the futu re restp rimarily on the d evelopmen t of newindustries based on advan ced tech nology.

The re are other 'contrad ictions' also .The development corpo ration of the newtown, which celebra ted its first twenty­one years of exist ence in 1984, the terminalpoint of this vo lume, managed an areaw hich h ad never p re vio usl y beenadminis te red as a sing le unit, and itsdeve lopmen t plan was suspended or fun­damentally changed four time s in sixteenyea rs as the idea of taking in the 'conu rba­tion over-spill ' of Birmingham gave way tothe very dif ferent idea of the town becom­ing a region al econ omic grow th point. The

The Victoria Hi story of Sh rops h ire:Volume XI, Telfo rd, ed ited by G .c.Baugh. xix + 377 pp. (Published forthe Universi ty of London, Inst itute ofHistorical Research, by Oxford Ulliver­sity Press, £SO)

711t? fetTachs ­symbol in stone ofthe rrorganisationof the empire intoeast and west (withsubordinateCaesars for fad, )by Diocietion(286-305). Tile'levellingdespotism' of tileemperor who'stopped tile rot' ofthird-centurvfncroacllmell ts Otl

the empirealso forGibbollfores iladowed tileens lavement andritual ofByzatltlum .Diocletianabandoned thepurple after the lastgreat Christianpersecu tion of 303,retiring to hispalace at Split,writing to thosewho entreated hisreturn 'if vou couldseemy rnvbagt.'S,you would notWiS!l me toabandon this happylife'.

FOR FURTHE R REA DI NG:The best edition of the Declineand Fall curren tlyavailable is that edited in seven volumes by J.B.Bury. Gibbon's Memoirs have been excellentlyed ited by Geo rges Bonna rd (Nelson, 1966). Twobrief intellec tual biographies are }.W. Burrow'sGibl1tlll (Oxford, Past Masters, 1985) and theeloquent Gibboll (Lon don, 1932) by C .M.Young. weightier in terp reta tion is offered inC .W. Bowers tock. John Clive and Stephen R.G raubard (eds ], EdwardCidxmund tlte Fall of theRoman Empire (Har vard University Press, 19n ),and a literary approach is offered in Harold L.Bond, TIlt' Littrury Ar t of Eduxud Gibbon (OxfordUni versity Press, llJOO).

Triumph of thepale Galilean ­the Iwderground

religion tllat producedcatacomb frescoesof theGood 5i1 epilerd (riXil/)

transmuted into an imperial cllitafter Constanti " f (313-37) adopted

Christianity as Rome's offiall religion, incorporating itsChi-Rho symbol(ChristosJ in !Iis coinage.

let alone to contem plate a Napoleonrising on the backs of the people as anew Constantine.

Yet prophecy is not the histor ian 'sjob, an d Gibbon's failure to predict thefuture is no condemna tion of his his­tory but a vind ication of those vicis­situdes of fortune he understood sowell. As 'civil pru dence ' the Declineand Fall was rendered ins tantly obso­lete ; as histo ry it guarantees G ibbonthe im mortali ty he craved.

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