Editing Edward Gibbon (section)

==Later life: 1789–1794==
[[File:Gibbon memorial tablet 1.jpg|thumb|Gibbon's memorial tablet on the Sheffield Mausoleum in St Andrew & St Mary The Virgin's church in [[Fletching, East Sussex]]]]
The years following Gibbon's completion of ''The History'' were filled largely with sorrow and increasing physical discomfort. He had returned to London in late 1787 to oversee the publication process alongside [[John Baker-Holroyd, 1st Earl of Sheffield|Lord Sheffield]]. With that accomplished, in 1789 it was back to Lausanne only to learn of and be "deeply affected" by the death of Deyverdun, who had willed Gibbon his home, La Grotte. He resided there with little commotion, took in the local society, received a visit from Sheffield in 1791, and "shared the common abhorrence" of the [[French Revolution]]. In 1793, word came of Lady Sheffield's death; Gibbon immediately left Lausanne and set sail to comfort a grieving but composed Sheffield. His health began to fail critically in December, and at the turn of the new year, he was on his last legs.<ref name="DNB" />

Among Edward Gibbon's maladies was gout.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/p/porter-gout.html|website=The New York Times|date=1998|title=Gout, The Patrician Malady|author=Roy Porter and G.S. Rousseau}}</ref> Gibbon is also believed to have suffered from an extreme case of scrotal swelling, probably a [[hydrocele testis]], a condition that causes the scrotum to swell with fluid in a compartment overlying either testicle.<ref>{{cite journal|title= 'Varnish the business for the ladies': Edward Gibbon's decline and fall|pmc=1297297 |pmid=10615283 |volume=92 |issue= 7|year=1999 |journal=J R Soc Med |pages=374–79 | last1 = Jellinek | first1 = E. H.|doi = 10.1177/014107689909200716}}</ref> In an age when close-fitting clothes were fashionable, his condition led to a chronic and disfiguring inflammation that left Gibbon a lonely figure.<!-- this is out until we find where it is. He was to write, "I can recall only fourteen truly happy days in my life." Gibbon, ''Memoirs''.--><ref>After more than two centuries, the exact nature of Gibbon's ailment remains a bone of contention. [[Patricia Craddock]], in a very full and graphic account of Gibbon's last days, notes that Sir Gavin de Beer's medical analysis of 1949 "makes it ''certain'' that Gibbon did ''not'' have a true hydrocele...and highly probable that he was suffering both from a 'large and irreducible hernia' and cirrhosis of the liver." Also worthy of note are Gibbon's congenial and even joking moods while in excruciating pain as he neared the end. Both authors report this late bit of Gibbonian bawdiness: "Why is a fat man like a Cornish Borough? Because he never sees his member." see Womersley, ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', p. 16;  Craddock, ''Luminous Historian'', 334–342; and Beer, "Malady".</ref> As his condition worsened, he underwent numerous procedures to alleviate the condition, but with no enduring success.  In early January, the last of a series of three operations caused an unremitting [[peritonitis]] to set in and spread, from which he died.{{citation needed|date=January 2024}}

The "English giant of the Enlightenment"<ref>so styled by the "unrivalled master of Enlightenment studies," historian Franco Venturi (1914–1994) in his ''Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment'' (Cambridge: 1971), p. 132. See Pocock, ''Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon'', p. 6; x.</ref> finally succumbed at 12:45 pm, 16 January 1794 at age 56. He was buried in the Sheffield Mausoleum attached to the north transept of the Church of St Mary and St Andrew, [[Fletching, East Sussex]],<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.mmtrust.org.uk/mausolea/view/357/Sheffield_Mausoleum|title=Sheffield Mausoleum - Mausolea & Monuments Trust|website=www.mmtrust.org.uk|access-date=25 July 2015|archive-date=25 July 2015|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150725073325/http://www.mmtrust.org.uk/mausolea/view/357/Sheffield_Mausoleum|url-status=dead}}</ref> having died in Fletching while staying with his great friend, [[John Baker-Holroyd, 1st Earl of Sheffield|Lord Sheffield]]. Gibbon's estate was valued at approximately £26,000. He left most of his property to cousins. As stipulated in his will, Sheffield oversaw the sale of his library at auction to [[William Thomas Beckford|William Beckford]] for £950.<ref>Womersley, ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', 17–18.</ref> What happened next suggests that Beckford may have known of Gibbon's moralistic, 'impertinent animadversion' at his expense in the presence of the Duchess of Devonshire at Lausanne. Gibbon's wish that his 6,000-book library would not be locked up 'under the key of a jealous master' was effectively denied by Beckford who retained it in Lausanne until 1801 before inspecting it, then locking it up again until at least as late as 1818 before giving most of the books back to Gibbon's physician Dr Scholl who had helped negotiate the sale in the first place. Beckford's annotated copy of the ''Decline and Fall'' turned up in Christie's in 1953, complete with his critique of what he considered the author's 'ludicrous self-complacency ... your frequent distortion of historical Truth to provoke a gibe, or excite a sneer ... your ignorance of oriental languages [etc.]'.<ref>[[Edward Chaney]], "Gibbon, Beckford and the Interpretation of ''Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents''", ''The Beckford Society Annual Lectures 2000–2003'' (Beckford Society, 2004), pp. 45-47</ref>