`Highly Improved By Labour and Manure'

Like all good readers I read selfishly, alert for images of myself, whether flattering or otherwise. Six years ago this week, I began reading Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in the three-volume Penguin Classics edition, edited by David Womersley. I finished on Feb. 12, the birthday of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, having read little else in the interim. That was a harsh winter, even by upstate New York standards, and now I associate Gibbon’s glorious prose with deep snow, low skies and cold feet. Afterwards, as a reward, I read Gibbon’s Memoirs of My Life, weighing in at a sylph-like 237 pages. Here’s one of many pleasing passages:

“I am endowed with a cheerful temper, a moderate sensibility, and a natural disposition to repose rather than to action: some mischievous appetites and habits have perhaps been corrected by philosophy or time. The love of study, a passion which derives fresh vigour from enjoyment, supplies each day, each hour, with a perpetual source of independent and rational pleasure, and I am not sensible of any decay of the mental faculties. The original soil has been highly improved by labour and manure; but it may be questioned whether some flowers of fancy, some grateful errors, have not been eradicated with the weeds of prejudice.”

The “manure” reference is apt.