Literary studies, volume 2 (of 2)

"Literary studies, volume 2 (of 2)" by Walter Bagehot is a collection of literary essays written in the late 19th century. It offers keen, often witty portraits of major historians, poets, and novelists, blending biography with analyses of style, culture, religion, and politics. Readers encounter critical studies of figures from Gibbon and Dickens to Wordsworth and Tennyson, alongside reflective appendices on belief, conviction, and toleration.

The opening of the volume is Bagehot’s essay on Edward Gibbon, which briskly sketches Gibbon’s lineage (including his speculating grandfather of South Sea Bubble fame), his sickly childhood and aunt-guided education, and his voracious, desultory early reading. Bagehot recounts Gibbon’s unhappy stint at Oxford, his teenage conversion to Roman Catholicism under the spell of Middleton’s arguments, his removal to Lausanne, reconversion under the Protestant pastor Pavilliard, and his prudent breaking off of a youthful engagement with Mademoiselle Curchod. He follows Gibbon back to England—through militia service, disciplined classical study, a French critical treatise tempered by Hume’s advice to write in English, entry into Parliament supporting Lord North, and the immediate success of the first volume of The Decline and Fall. Bagehot then assesses Gibbon’s method: a grand, ceremonious style “in minuet time,” immense research and compositional mastery, and particular brilliance on Constantinople and imperial machinery. He also pinpoints limits—the neglect of common life and vivid character, a cool misunderstanding of the inner religious spirit of Rome and early Christianity, and a somewhat flattened view of the barbarian world—while distinguishing the demands of universal versus particular history. The section reads as a compact life-and-works critique that sets Gibbon’s achievement, style, and blind spots in clear relief.