arthquake in your own city and the one 3000
miles away. As Gibbon's pocket-nerve was sensitive, it may be he was
also thinking of the L1300 he had invested in 1784 in the new loan of
the King of France, deeming the French funds as solid as the
English.[67]

It is well now to repeat our dictum that Gibbon is the greatest modern
historian, but, in reasserting this, it is no more than fair to cite the
opinions of two dissentients--the great literary historians of the
nineteenth century, Macaulay and Carlyle. "The truth is," wrote Macaulay
in his diary, "that I admire no historians much except Herodotus,
Thucydides, and Tacitus.... There is merit no doubt in Hume, Robertson,
Voltaire, and Gibbon. Yet it is not the thing. I have a conception of
history more just, I am confident, than theirs."[68] "Gibbon," said
Carlyle in a public lecture, is "a greater historian than Robertson but
not so great as Hume. With all his swagger and bombast, no man ever gave
a more futile account of human things than he has done of the decline
and fall of the Roman Empire; assigning no profound cause for these
phenomena, nothing but diseased nerves, and all sorts of miserable
motives, to the actors in them."[69] Carlyle's statement shows envious
criticism as well as a prejudice in favor of his brother Scotchman. It
was made in 1838, since when opinion has raised Gibbon to the top, for
he actually lives while Hume is read perfunctorily, if at all. Moreover
among the three--Gibbon, Macaulay, and Carlyle--whose works are
literature as well as history, modern criticism has no hesitation in
awarding the palm to Gibbon.

Before finally deciding upon his subject Gibbon thought of "The History
of the Liberty of the Swiss" and "The History of the Republic of
Florence under the House of Medicis,"[70] but in the end, as we have
seen, he settled on the later history of the Roman Empire, showing, as
Lowell said of Parkman, his genius in the choice of his subject. His
history really begins with the death of Marcus Aurelius, 180 A.D., but
the main narrative is preceded by three excellent introductory chapters,
covering in Bury's edition eighty-two pages. After the completion of his
work, he regretted that he had not begun it at an earlier period. On
the first page of his own printed copy of his book where he announces
his design, he has entered this marginal note: "Should I not have given
the _history_ of that fortunate period which was interposed between two