Education Quote by Edward Gibbon

Gibbon is bragging, but he’s also confessing. The line is an elegant little workaround: he presents his English prose as “chaste” while admitting that anything racy, scabrous, or politically dangerous has been smuggled into Latin or Greek, safely tucked behind the velvet rope of “a learned language.” It’s a joke with teeth. Chastity here isn’t moral purity so much as audience management.

The intent is double: protect the author and flatter the reader. By shifting licentious material into scholarly tongues, Gibbon dodges the prying eyes of censors, scandal-hungry moralists, and the broader reading public who might punish him for indecency or irreverence. At the same time, he winks at an elite audience who can decode the supposedly “decent obscurity.” If you can read it, you’re in the club; if you can’t, you’re spared - and quietly patronized.

The subtext is Enlightenment-era hypocrisy made into a style choice. Eighteenth-century Britain prided itself on civility and decorum while thriving on satire, sexual gossip, and anti-clerical provocation. Gibbon’s historian persona depends on authority and composure; open bawdiness would risk collapsing the pose. So he weaponizes erudition as a curtain: scholarship becomes both camouflage and credential.

Context matters: Gibbon wrote in a culture where religion, sex, and empire were combustible topics, and where Latin still functioned as an elite code. The line makes his method sound like propriety, but it’s really a sophisticated act of boundary-setting - and a sly reminder that “decency” often just means “restricted access.”