concept had laid upon him the duty of combining in a single
composition a historical narrative, made up of tested and therefore
reliable data, with an interpretation of those facts which both shaped
the narrative and gave meaning to it. The writing of history was for
Gibbon a moral discourse; it was much more than an antiquarian
gathering of data, however securely based or chronologically arranged.
But he was also more than a philosopher, working from first principles
or broad sweeps of knowledge; philosophical exposition required the
ballast of fact to give truth to conclusions. Gibbon was also a stylist, a
self-conscious literary creator, who needed not only to shape aesthet-
ically the structure of the whole work but to employ in his writing the
appropriate mode of expression. As he explains in his Memoirs (p. 184),
finding the right style for the Decline and Fall, the correct voice with
which to address his readership, required experiment. His greatest
achievement, of course, was to satisfy all these obligations during
the 17 years of concentrated reading, reflection and writing which
produced the six volumes of his history. The scholarly substance of that
work remains a staggering performance, a monument of collected
data; the interpretive significance of the story he narrates with its
emphasis on the causes of decay in civilisation is also profound; and the
style has the pace, clarity, irony and wit to carry even modern readers
through his multiple volumes and to establish an intimacy between
author and reader.

Gibbon's problem in writing the Memoirs was, first, to establish his
facts. His curiosity about the past and his reputation as a scholar
required and encouraged him to try and present to the public a
factually reliable narrative of his own life. The stimulus seems to have
been an apparently sound body of information about his ancestry
provided by a fellow scholar: this was the gift in 1786 by Ernst Theodor
Langer, librarian to the Duke of Brunswick, of a 1682 treatise on
heraldry by John Gibbon the Herald, Bluemantle Pursuivant. John
Gibbon included in his text some notes on his family history, referring
to various illustrious Kentish forbears. Edward Gibbon leapt to the
conclusion, rashly for a historian but revealingly for a man with social
pretensions, that John Gibbon was the brother of Matthew Gibbon, his
great-grandfather, also from Kent, and that he therefore shared these
distinguished if remote ancestors. It was unsettling somewhat late in
the day, in 1792, to discover from the researches of Sir Samuel Egerton
Brydges, a distant relative, that this connection was false. It com-
pounded Gibbon's authorial difficulties. He had been trying to figure out
his family and personal history while living abroad in Lausanne, away
from first-hand documentary and oral sources, and reliant on his
memory, some early and incomplete journals, and on such corre-
spondence as he had retained or could recover.² Factual accuracy in
autobiography is not easy to obtain -- even when desired.

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