One fellow to another

I shall venture to defend Gibbon to you.
I don't find him smug. It seems to me
that, behind the genuine belief in prog-
ress there is always, in Gibbon, a sub-
tlety, a sensitivity, occasionally a mel-
ancholy, which is totally absent from
(say) Voltaire. I suppose I have, by now,
got so used to the formal style that I
hardly notice it, and I enjoy all the 
more the urbanity, the irony, the human-
ity, which underlies it. Also I love the
marvelous precision of language, the ex-
act choice of words to convey such del-
icate shades and ambiguities of meaning.

   Do write again: I love
   your letters, and I      long to hear from you.    Do keep well. I wish I    could see you.


        yours ever
        Hugh

































Hugh Trevor-Roper
Regius Professor of History
  Oxford
Master of Peterhouse
  Cambridge
Lord Dacre of Glanton 
Letter to Gerald Brenan
  [fragment]
11 March 1968

Richard Davenport-Hines
  and Adam Sisman, editors
One Hundred Letters from
  Hugh Trevor-Roper
Oxford University Press, 2014©

Tassos Paschalis
Northern Greece
2013