IV.
The author of the Mémoire Justificatif was quite
pleased with his handiwork. He remarked that "it has . . . been
communicated as a State paper . . . to all the Ministers and Courts
of Europe, and as far as I can understand it has been received with
some degree of approbation" (Prothero, I, 372). He even mentioned
a Turkish translation to Lord Sheffield who declared that, "At
Petersburgh and Vienna it was currently observed by the Corps
Diplomatique, that the English Ministry had published a Memorial
written not only with great and more than usual ability, but also
in French, so correct, that they must have employed a Frenchman"
(Sheffield, I, xix-xx). Gibbon's high opinion of his own prowess (a
characteristic not limited to the present problem) has been widely
upheld despite an embarrassing lack of substantiation from the
Continent. Norton's efforts uncovered only a translation of an
English newspaper version at the Quai D'Orsay, and no other
official foreign notice of
the Mémoire has come to light. Certainly Gibbon's
pamphlet circulated abroad, but as Madame du Deffand, who refused
to read it, informed Horace Walpole, "Il n'a pas un grand
succès."[9] A portion of the
honors claimed by Gibbon must be attributed to the simultaneous
publication under remarkably similar circumstances of another
anonymous pamphlet bearing the same short title. This was Sir James
Marriott's Mémoire Justificatif de la conduite de la Grande
Bretagne, en arrêtant les navires étrangers et les munitions
de guerre, destinées aux insurgens de l'Amerique (Londres:
Imprimé par T. Harrison et S. Brooke, MDCCLXXIX). The
Marriott
pamphlet, which Norton found attributed to Gibbon in the French
archives, was an able statement of maritime law written by a judge
of the Admiralty court. Printed at the expense of the English
government and circulated by Sir Joseph Yorke, ambassador at the
Hague, it was directed to "all
the Maritime Neutral Courts, with great success."[10] A comparison of the subject matter
in
the two Mémoires strongly suggests that Marriott's
would
have been of far more interest to Russian or Turk than Gibbon's
pamphlet, and should receive long overdue recognition.
