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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2009
We may be well assured, that a writer, conversant with the world, would never have ventured to expose the gods of his country to public ridicule, had they not already been the objects of secret contempt among the polished and enlightened orders of society.
Edward Gibbon, The decline and fall of the Roman Empire, vol. I, ch. 2We know, and what is better, we feel inwardly, that religion is the basis of civil society and the source of all good and all comfort. In England we are so convinced of this that there is no rust of superstition with which the accumulated absurdity of the human mind might have crusted it over in the course of all ages, that ninety nine in a hundred of the people in England would not prefer to impiety.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in FranceThis essay is one of a series of interlocking studies, designed in the end to compose a monograph which will approach the last eighteen years of Gibbon's life by examining the complicated influence exerted by the historian's reputation over his writing. Gibbon was unabashed in acknowledging that the desire for fame was his prime motive as a writer. It is in the Vindication of 1779 that we find this most frankly stated: ‘I have never affected, indeed I have never understood, the stoical apathy, the proud contempt of criticism, which some authors have publicly professed. Fame is the motive, it is the reward, of our labours …’ This sentiment was no affectation adopted for public effect.
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