The most, indeed the only, interesting fact about the Gibbon _entourage_ is that the greatest of English mystics, William Law, the inimitable author of _A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, adapted to the State and Conditions of all Orders of Christians_, was long tutor to the historian's father, and in that capacity accompanied the future historian to Emanuel College, Cambridge, and was afterwards, and till the end of his days, spiritual director to Miss Hester Gibbon, the historian's eccentric maiden aunt.
It is an unpleasing impertinence for anyone to assume that nobody save himself reads any particular book. I read with astonishment the other day that Sir Humphry Davy's _Consolations in Travel; or, The Closing Days of a Philosopher's Life_, was a curious and totally forgotten work. It is, however, always safe to say of a good book that it is not read as much as it ought to be, and of Law's _Serious Call_ you may add, 'or as much as it used to be.' It is a book with a strange and moving spiritual pedigree. Dr. Johnson, one remembers, took it up carelessly at Oxford, expecting to find it a dull book, 'as,' (the words are his, not mine,) 'such books generally are; but,' he proceeds, 'I found Law an overmatch for me, and this was the first occasion of my thinking in earnest.' George Whitfield writes, 'Soon after my coming up to the university, seeing a small edition of Mr. Law's _Serious Call_ in a friend's hand, I soon purchased it. God worked powerfully upon my soul by that excellent treatise.' The celebrated Thomas Scott, of Aston Sandford, with the confidence of his school, dates the beginning of his spiritual life from the hour when he 'carelessly,' as he says, 'took up Mr. Law's _Serious Call_, a book I had hitherto treated with contempt.' When we remember how Newman in his _Apologia_ speaks of Thomas Scott as the writer 'to whom, humanly speaking, I almost owe my soul,' we become lost amidst a mazy dance of strange, spectral influences which flit about the centuries and make us what we are. Splendid achievement though the _History of the Decline and Fall_ may be, glorious monument though it is, more lasting than brass, of learning and industry, yet in sundry moods it seems but a poor and barren thing by the side of a book which, like Law's _Serious Call_, has proved its power