LeapFrog 600803 Mr Pencil's Scribble and Write Interactive Learning Toy Educational Baby Letters, Numbers and Shapes for Toddlers and Kids, Boys and Girls 3, 4, 5+ Year Olds

Product Information

Draw the letters and numbers correctly to see the letters transform into animated animals, objects, and more and the numbers turn into objects you can count. Gibbon had no followers, founded no school, and his chief bequest to posterity was in fact his style, one of the most distinctive in the English language, whose influence is now and again detectable in the prose of English historians down to the present day. Move Mr. Pencil® under the words to hear them sounded out. The sound-it-out bar lights up as you go.

E. M. Forster to Malcolm Darling (15 April 1910), quoted in Selected Letters of E. M. Forster. Volume One, 1879–1920, eds. Mary Lago and P. N. Furbank (1983), p. 107 This has often been paraphrased: History is indeed little more than the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind. Vol. i. p. 106. Compare: "None ever loved but at first sight they loved", George Chapman, The Blind Beggar of Alexandria.

You May Also Like

I]n this rage against slavery, in the numerous petitions against the Slave trade was there no leaven of new democratical principles, no wild ideas of the rights and natural equality of man? It is these I fear. Andrew Lossky, ‘Introduction’, in Lynn White, Jr. (ed.), The Transformation of the Roman World: Gibbon's Problem after Two Centuries [1966] (1973), p. 29 Vol. 1, Chap. 3. Compare: "L'histoire n'est que le tableau des crimes et des malheurs" (translated: "History is but the record of crimes and misfortunes"), Voltaire, L'Ingénu, chap. x. Though what Gibbon calls ‘the curiosity of the public’ may have exhausted itself long since, the candid judgment of many generations and of almost every class of readers has confirmed the opinion formed at once by Gibbon's own age. His great work remains an enduring monument of research, an imperishable literary possession and one of the highest encouragements to intellectual endeavour that can be found in the history of letters. T]he effect of Tacitus, the best historian that Rome produced, can be felt in Gibbon, the best modern historian of Rome... Gibbon realized that Tacitus, sometimes seen as primarily a literary artist, preferring point and drama to the dispassionate search for truth, was a genuinely philosophic historian; and Tacitus showed him how a philosophic history could be not hindered but served by irony, disenchantment, and apophthegmatic wit... In both men this way of speaking brings out the ambiguity of history, the hiddenness of human motive. Influence or coincidence? It is impossible to be sure, but it is fair enough to say that Gibbon has Tacitus in his bones.

Gibbon's idol Tacitus had been as much moralist as historian. There is a general message in The Decline and Fall, concerned with the worth of freedom and the idealisation of the Roman republic. Furthermore, Gibbon has no doubts about ethical standards of conduct and behaviour, singling out, for instance, the love of pleasure and the love of action as essential components of normal human nature. Some attempts have been made to trace Gibbon's politics specifically through his History, but these have failed to reveal a simple pattern. His instruction has more to do with the principles of human nature and character. If there is any general lesson beyond that, it takes (as L. P. Curtis has observed) the form of a memorial oration to the governing classes on the subject of wisdom, virtue, and power. But Gibbon was too cynical to have had much faith in the effects of instruction, though that did not prevent him from making it part of his historical writing. The experience of past faults, he pointed out, was seldom profitable to the successive generations of mankind. As I ran through your volume of history with great avidity and impatience, I cannot forbear discovering somewhat of the same impatience in returning you thanks for your agreeable present, and expressing the satisfaction which the performance has given me. Whether I consider the dignity of your style, the depth of your matter, or the extensiveness of your learning, I must regard the work as equally the object of esteem. Letter to Lady Elizabeth Foster (4 April 1793), quoted in The Letters of Edward Gibbon: Volume Three 1784–1794, Letters 619–878, ed. J. E. Norton (1956), pp. 324–325 For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Letter to Lord Sheffield (1 January 1793), quoted in The Letters of Edward Gibbon: Volume Three 1784–1794, Letters 619–878, ed. J. E. Norton (1956), p. 307 Adolphus Ward, ‘Historians. II. Gibbon’, in A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller (eds.), The Cambridge History of English Literature, Volume X: The Age of Johnson (1913), p. 298 Poor Burke is the most eloquent and rational madman that I ever knew. I love Fox's feelings, but I detest the political principles of the man and of the party. ... Should you admire the National assembly we shall have many an altercation, for I am as high an Aristocrate as Burke himself, and he has truly observed that it is impossible to debate with temper on the subject of that cursed Revolution. Burke's book is a most admirable medication against the French disease, which has made too much progress even in this happy country. I admire his eloquence, I approve his politics, I adore his chivalry, and I can even forgive his superstition.

Richard Jenkyns, ‘The Legacy of Rome’, in Richard Jenkyns (ed.), The Legacy of Rome: A New Appraisal (1992), pp. 20–21 Samuel Rogers, Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers. To which is added Porsoniana (1856), pp. 302–303 David Hume to Gibbon (18 March 1776), quoted in Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life and Writings, in Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, Vol. I, ed. Lord Sheffield (1796), p. 148. Gibbon said this "letter from Mr. Hume overpaid the labour of ten years".If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Letter to Dorothea Gibbon (1 August 1792), quoted in The Letters of Edward Gibbon: Volume Three 1784–1794, Letters 619–878, ed. J. E. Norton (1956), pp. 265–266 Gibbon was not interested in religious doctrine, though he amused himself with its speculative refinements. But religion and Churches, he would admit, are a social and psychological necessity, and the particular forms which they take are important, for they can influence the progress or decline of civilization. Therefore the historical question he asked was, did the ideas of Christianity and the organization of the Church, as adapted to the Roman Empire, generate or stifle public spirit, freedom, and the advancement of knowledge and a plural society. In the Decline and Fall, the civic humanist cycle of corruption, so often repeated in Gibbon's history, was balanced by another and newer theme, the Enlightenment's conception of the development of civilisation, which surrounds the work with an optimism which the story it tells, by itself, could hardly warrant. The notion of the gradual progress of the useful arts, through human industry, is one aspect of that optimism: Gibbon owes a debt, reflected in his footnotes, to Smith's Wealth of Nations. It is true that this version of progress is not heavily stressed; in the Decline and Fall, the most obvious antithesis is still the old one of republican patriotism and barbarian hardihood set against the "indolence", "luxury" and "effeminacy" of supine Asiatics and of once energetic former barbarian conquerors enervated by their own success. Yet there is clearly another possible antithesis to indolence and luxury: industry and a permissible (if still dangerous) civilised opulence. HERE is an anecdote of William Spencer's which has just occurred to me. The dramatis personae were Lady Elizabeth Foster, Gibbon the historian, and an eminent French physician whose name I forget; the historian and doctor being rivals in courting the lady's favour. Impatient at Gibbon's occupying so much of her attention by his conversation, the doctor said crossly to him, 'Quand milady Elizabeth Foster sera malade de vos fadaises, je la guérirai.'