The Devil's Details Read Free Page A

without Johns Hopkins’s mazy addition; that it occurs in the biography of England’s best-known footnoter suggests a lack of taste as well as an absence of thoughtfulness.
    38. Patricia B. Craddock,
Edward Gibbon: Luminous Historian, 1772-1794
(Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 8.
    39. Ibid., p. 93.
    40. Ibid.
    41. Quoted in Anthony Grafton,
The Footnote: A Curious History
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 103. Grafton practices a kind of truncated footnoting that reflects, I think, the scholarly bias of his view of footnotes. His citation reads: “
The Letters of David Hume
, ed. J. Y. T. Greig (Oxford, 1932), II, 313.”
    42. Edward Gibbon,
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(London: Methuen, 1896), vol. I, p. 94. From the many editions of the History , I have chosen the one edited by J. B. Bury. It is a classic edition, of course, but its compact format, into which so many footnotes and marginality are given just enough but not more space than absolutely necessary, may alert the reader unfamiliar with Gibbon as to exactly how magnificent was his accomplishment. Not only did he master the voluminous and unreliable sources of Rome’s history, not only did he manage to lay down parallel after parallel sentence with scarcely a dull paragraph—or at least without an entirely dull page—but he did it at a time when London lacked public libraries and when publishers lacked the resources that those of today often enjoy, and who were always tempted to make the page do more than it comfortably can do. One is hard pressed to choose Gibbon’s primary virtue: his resilience, his reliability, or his readability.
    43. Ibid., note 35.
    44. Ibid., note 36.
    45. Edward Gibbon,
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(London: Methuen, 1896), vol. IV, p. 153, note 151.
    46.Edward Gibbon,
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(London: Methuen, 1896), vol. VII, p. 281.
    47. Ibid., p. 256.
    48. Ibid.
    49. Patricia B. Craddock,
Young Edward Gibbon: Gentleman of Letters
(Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 107.
    50. Ibid., p. 110.
    51. No love affair, however brief and however young the participants, can ever be summarized in a few lines. For a more complete, complicated, and painful account of this affair, see Patricia B. Craddock,
Edward Gibbon: Luminous Historian, 1772-1794
(Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), especially pp. 136-7, 156-7, 172-4.
    52. See Patricia B. Craddock,
Edward Gibbon: Luminous Historian, 1772-1794
(Baltimore, London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 84. Craddock is no better served by her publisher in this second volume of her luminous (to borrow the adjective she applies to Gibbon’s work) biography than she was in her first volume. Note 10 in her text sends us to the back of the book where, under the general heading of “Notes to Pages 80-91,” we find “10. Gibbon 1814, 2:177.” To learn more we must proceed even further into the appendices’ dungeon. Under the general heading of “Works Frequently Cited” and specifically under the entry for Gibbon, Edward, we are informed of a “---, 1814, The Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon . Edited by John, Lord Sheffield. 5 vols. London: Cadell & Davies.” The letter from Suzanne Necker is presumably part of that collection, but one feels less a scholar checking a source than a child sent out on a scavenger hunt by a baby-sitter who is particularly imaginative and resourceful.
    53. Patricia B. Craddock,
Edward Gibbon: Luminous Historian, 1772-1794
(Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 84.
    54. Ibid.
    55. Ibid., but be alert. The baby-sitting publisher’s scavenger hunt leads us to a slightly different reference: Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works , 1814, 2:179, 178.
    56. Ibid., note 12.
    57.