Yet when an author's one book is immediately recognized as a classic, survives for more than a century as the major authority in its field, and is thereafter edited and annotated so that--even after it has been superseded in details or supplemented in approach--it can serve new generations as a classical document, one book suffices, as the author hoped and expected, to ensure the "immortality of [his] name and writings."
Gibbon was the eldest son of star-crossed lovers. Their marriage had received the reluctant consent of Gibbon's formidable paternal grandfather, who died a few months before Gibbon's birth, at some financial cost: not only was the estate entirely entailed, but descendants of a more profitable marriage, if such were ever to occur, would take precedence over those of the marriage that produced Gibbon himself. Edward and Judith Porten Gibbon, parents of the historian, were, moreover, so entirely devoted to each other that they left their sickly infant to the care of his mother's sister, Catherine Porten, "the true mother of [his] mind as well as of [his] health." He learned to read so early that he could not remember not knowing how, but he knew that it was his Aunt Kitty's "kind lessons" that gave him the "early and invincible love of reading, which [he] would not exchange for the treasures of India."
In an interval of health at the age of seven he enjoyed the tutelage of one John Kirkby, author of a grammar and of a philosophic romance, for some months; and in 1746 he suffered the advantages of the grammar school at Kingston-upon-Thames, where he was buffeted by his classmates for the "sins of his Tory ancestors" (the children's reaction to the Jacobite uprising of 1745) and "at the expence of many tears and some blood, ...
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