IF, as Johnson said, there had been only three books
"written by man that were wished longer by their readers,"
the eighteenth century was not to draw to its close with-
out seeing a fourth added. With Don Quixote, The
Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe, the Autobio-
graphy of Edward Gibbon was henceforth to rank as "a
work whose conclusion is perceived with an eye of sorrow,
such as the traveller casts upon departing day". It is
indeed so short that it can be read by the light of a single
pair of candles; it is so interesting in its subject, and so
alluring in its turns of thought and its style, that in a
second and a third reading it gives scarcely less pleasure
than in the first. Among the books in which men have
told the story of their own lives it stands in the front
rank. It is a striking fact that one of the first of autobio-
graphies and the first of biographies were written in the
same years.
Boswell was still working at his Life of
Johnson when Gibbon began those memoirs from which
his autobiography, in the form in which it was given to
the world, was so skilfully pieced together. But a short
time had gone by since Johnson had said that "he did
not think that the life of any literary man in England had
been well written". That reproach against our writers he
himself did much to lessen by his Lives of Cowley and of
Milton, of Dryden and of Pope. It was finally removed
by two members of that famous club which he had helped
to found. However weak was the end of the eighteenth