difficult is the start in matters of this
kind.

While engaged in the composition of the first volume, he became a
member of Parliament. One morning at half past seven, "as he was
destroying an army of barbarians," he heard a double rap at his door.
It was a friend who came to inquire if he was desirous of entering
the House of Commons. The answer may be imagined, and he took his seat
as member for the borough of Liskeard after the general election in
1774.

Gibbon's political career is the side of his history from which a
friendly biographer would most readily turn away. Not that it was
exceptionally ignoble or self-seeking if tried by the standard of the
time, but it was altogether commonplace and unworthy of him. The fact
that he never even once opened his mouth in the House is not in itself
blameworthy, though disappointing in a man of his power. It was indeed
laudable enough if he had nothing to say. But why had he nothing to
say? His excuse is timidity and want of readiness. We may reasonably
assume that the cause lay deeper. With his mental vigour he would soon
have overcome such obstacles if he had really wished and tried to
overcome them. The fact is that he never tried because he never
wished. It is a singular thing to say of such a man, but nevertheless
true, that he had no taste or capacity whatever for politics. He lived
at one of the most exciting periods of our history; he assisted at
debates in which constitutional and imperial questions of the highest
moment were discussed by masters of eloquence and state policy, and he
hardly appears to have been aware of the fact. It was not that he
despised politics as Walpole affected to do, or that he regarded party
struggles as "barbarous and absurd faction," as Hume did; still less
did he pass by them with the supercilious indifference of a mystic
whose eyes are fixed on the individual spirit of man as the one spring
of good and evil. He never rose to the level of the ordinary citizen
or even partisan, who takes an exaggerated view perhaps of the
importance of the politics of the day, but who at any rate thereby
shows a sense of social solidarity and the claims of civic communion.
He called himself a Whig, but he had no zeal for Whig principles. He
voted steadily with Lord North, and quite approved of taxing and
coercing America into slavery; but he had no high notions of the royal
prerogative, and was lukewarm in this as in everything. With such
absence of p