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part in the whole order of society. A career which is a systematic application of a single governing principle has at least an aesthetic, if not a purely ethical, charm. It represents a successful experiment worth noting in the great art of life. The subject may not be a saint or a hero—Gibbon certainly was neither—but under some conditions he may achieve results of which the saint and hero would be incapable. We may prefer Chatham or Clive or Wesley to Gibbon; but if he had followed any of their examples, we should have lost something which the whole generation could not have supplied without him. The course of intellectual development would have been sensibly different. Gibbon's type, no doubt, was the epicurean. Pleasure, he would have frankly admitted, is the true end of life. But pleasure to him, though it did not entirely exclude the grosser elements, and might occasionally be sought even at a militia mess-table, or in the more elegant dissipation at Almack's, included a strenuous and ceaseless exertion of the intellect upon worthy ends. It included, too, if not romantic devotion, yet fidelity in friendship, and the hearty enjoyment of the society of philosophers and statesmen. A higher as well as a lower strain