y foreign, should have been more
successful abroad than at home. I was delighted by the copious extracts,
the warm commendations, and the flattering predictions of the journals
of France and Holland: and the next year (1762) a new edition (I believe
at Geneva) extended the fame, or at least the circulation, of the work.
In England it was received with cold indifference, little read, and
speedily forgotten: a small impression was slowly dispersed; the
bookseller murmured, and the author (had his feelings been more
exquisite) might have wept over the blunders and baldness of the English
translation. The publication of my History fifteen years afterwards
revived the memory of my first performance, and the Essay was eagerly
sought in the shops. But I refused the permission which Becket solicited
of reprinting it: the public curiosity was imperfectly satisfied by
a pirated copy of the booksellers of Dublin; and when a copy of the
original edition has been discovered in a sale, the primitive value
of half-a-crown has risen to the fanciful price of a guinea or thirty
shillings.

I have expatiated on the petty circumstances and period of my first
publication, a memorable aera in the life of a student, when he ventures
to reveal the measure of his mind: his hopes and fears are multiplied by
the idea of self-importance, and he believes for a while that the eyes
of mankind are fixed on his person and performance. Whatever may be my
present reputation, it no longer rests on the merit of this first essay;
and at the end of twenty-eight years I may appreciate my juvenile work
with the impartiality, and almost with the indifference, of a stranger.
In his answer to Lady Hervey, the Count de Caylus admires, or affects to
admire, "les livres sans nombre que Mr. Gibbon a lus et tres bien
lus." But, alas! my stock of erudition at that time was scanty and
superficial; and if I allow myself the liberty of naming the Greek
masters, my genuine and personal acquaintance was confined to the Latin
classics. The most serious defect of my Essay is a kind of obscurity and
abruptness which always fatigues, and may often elude, the attention
of the reader. Instead of a precise and proper definition of the title
itself, the sense of the word Litterature is loosely and variously
applied: a number of remarks and examples, historical, critical,
philosophical, are heaped on each other without method or connection;
and if we except some introductory pages,