Boswell wrote of Gibbon in 1779:'He is an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow, and poisons our Literary Club to me.'

I propose to make myself famous as the Gibbon of the decline and fall of this reverend gentleman, once so honorably established on the everlasting hills of Orthodoxy, and now so overthrown and trampled under foot by the Alaric of Spiritualism.

In the Hastings speech he complimented Gibbon as a 'luminous' writer; questioned on this, he replied archly, 'I said vo-luminous.' I cannot afford to be voluminous on Sheridan, and so I quit him.

He had come from the little inner room where he had been reading Gibbon for the last two hours.

My own reading varied from "Quentin Durward" and Gibbon to the "Chanson de Roland."

In the discharge of his function as Laureate, he still continued, as he had long ago professed himself to be, Too free in servile courtly phrase to fawn; and had the wish been gratified,expressed by himself before his appointment, or by Gibbon after it,that the annual tribute might be dispensed with, we should have lost some of his best lyric effusions.

To the Senate and House of Representatives: I herewith transmit a communication from the Secretary of the Navy, accompanied by the second part of Lieutenant Herndon's report of the exploration of the valley of the Amazon and its tributaries, made by him in connection with Lieutenant Lardner Gibbon under instructions from the Navy Department.

So prosperous was the Church under his beneficence, that the average individual income of the eighteen hundred bishops of the Empire has been estimated by Gibbon at three thousand dollars a year, when money was much more valuable than it is in our times.

If Gibbon meant simply that this period was the happiest and most prosperous during the imperial reigns, he may not have been far from the truth, according to his standpoint of what human happiness consists in,that external prosperity which was the blessing of the Old Testament, and which Macaulay exalts as proudly as Gibbon before him.