te
generally with a serious intention, I know how to be occasionally
merry. The critical reviewers charged me with an attempt at humor.
John having been more celebrated upon the score of humor than most
pieces that have appeared in modern days, may serve to exonerate me
from the imputation; but in this article I am entirely under your
judgment, and mean to be set down by it. All these together will make
an octavo like the last. I should have told you that the piece which
now employs me is rime. I do not intend to write any more blank. It is
more difficult than rime, and not so amusing in the composition. If,
when you make the offer of my book to Johnson, he should stroke his
chin, and look up to the ceiling and cry "Humph!"--anticipate him, I
beseech you, at once, by saying--"that you know I should be sorry that
he should undertake for me to his own disadvantage, or that my volume
should be in any degree prest upon him. I make him the offer merely
because I think he would have reason to complain of me if I did not."
But that punctilio once satisfied, it is a matter of indifference to
me what publisher sends me forth.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 58: Letter to the Rev. John Newton, dated Olney, November
30, 1783.]

[Footnote 59: Letter to the Rev. William Unwin, dated "October 31,
1779."]

[Footnote 60: Letter to the Rev. William Unwin, dated "Olney, May 1,
1781."]

[Footnote 61: His first volume of verse.]

[Footnote 62: This paragraph is from another letter to Unwin, written
three weeks later--May 23, 1781.]

[Footnote 63: This letter, addrest to Unwin, and dated "October 30,
1784," refers to Cowper's poem "The Task."]

EDWARD GIBBON

Born in 1737, died in 1794; educated at Oxford, but was not
graduated; became a Catholic, but soon renounced that faith;
sent by his father to Lausanne, Switzerland, for instruction
by a Calvinist minister in 1753; there met and fell in love
with, but did not marry, Susanne Curchod; served in the
militia, becoming a colonel in 1759-70; traveled in France
and Italy in 1763-65; elected to Parliament in 1764; settled
permanently in Lausanne in 1783; published the first volume
of his "Decline and Fall" in 1776, and the last in 1778;
wrote also "Memoirs of My Life and Writings."

I

THE ROMANCE OF HIS YOUTH[64]

I hesitate, from the apprehension of ridicule, when I approach the
delicate subject of my early love. By th