Chapter 162

(1779.] (page 218)

The penetration, solidity, and taste, that made you the first of historians, dear Sir, prevent my being surprised at your being the best writer of controversial pamphlets too.(352) I have read you with more precipitation than such a work deserved, but I could not disobey you and detain it. Yet even in that hurry I could discern, besides a thousand beauties and strokes of wit, the inimitable eighty-third page, and the conscious dignity that you maintain throughout, over your monkish antagonists. When you are so superior in argument, it would look like insensibility to the power of your reasoning, to select transient passages for commendation; and yet I must mention one that pleased me particularly, from the delicacy of the severity, and from its novelty too; it is, bold is not the word. This is the feathered arrow of Cupid, that is more formidable than the club of Hercules. I need not specify thanks, when I prove how much I have been pleased. Your most obliged.

(351) Now first collected.

(352) Gibbon's celebrated "Vindication" of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Chapters of his History appeared early in the year 1779. "I adhered," he says in his Memoirs, "to the wise resolution of trusting myself and my writing to the candour of the public, till Mr. Davis of Oxford presumed to attack, not the faith but the fidelity of the historian. My Vindication, expressive of less anger than contempt, amused for a moment the busy and idle metropolis; and the most rational Part of the laity, and even of the clergy, appear to have been satisfied of my innocence and accuracy I would not print it in quarto, lest it should be bound and preserved with the history itself At the distance of twelve years, I calmly affirm my judgment of Davis, Chelsum, etc. A victory over such antagonists was a sufficient humiliation. They, however were rewarded in this world, Poor Chelsum was, indeed, neglected; and I dare not boast the making Dr. Watson a bishop: he is a prelate of a large mind and a liberal spirit: but I enjoyed the pleasure of giving a royal pension to Mr. Davis, and of collating Dr. Althorpe to an archiepiscopal living."-E.