THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF EDWARD GIBBON.

Edited and Introduced by DeroA. Saunders '35. New York: MeridianBooks, 1961. 224 pp. $1.35.

Dero Saunders, who by his edition of ThePortable Gibbon has already done much to lead new readers to the work of England's greatest historian, has edited another volume which should help in the same task. His new edition of the famous Autobiography will be welcomed, moreover, by students of the Eighteenth Century as well as the "new readers" for whom the book is expressly presented; for Mr. Saunders has made a number of significant changes in the standard text.

At his death, Gibbon left six drafts of his planned autobiography, and from these Lord Sheffield compiled what has come to be known as the Autobiography. In editing Gibbon's manuscripts, however, Sheffield made a number of deletions of matters he considered to be too intimate, too revealing or in bad taste. Mr. Saunders has restored most of these deletions, and the portrait of Gibbon which emerges from his edition is more accurate, more revealing, and, one should add, more human, than the picture Sheffield permitted the world to see. Since the publication of the six drafts of the autobiography in 1894 scholars have known about this more human portrait, but until now no one has taken the trouble to publish a restored and expanded version of Sheffield's work.

Mr. Saunders has done his work carefully and well. A clear introduction explains his editorial problems and his solutions for them. He has modernized spelling in the text and reparagraphed and repunctuated. Some commentary on Gibbon's style and a description of Gibbon's physical features round out the introduction to this extraordinary Autobiography of a .man who wrote the history of his own life in almost exactly the same style as he wrote the History of the Declineand Fall of the Roman Empire.