information and abilities of his critic. One
testimonial will suffice. Mr. Freeman says: "That Gibbon should ever
be displaced seems impossible. That wonderful man monopolised, so to
speak, the historical genius and the historical learning of a whole
generation, and left little, indeed, of either for his contemporaries.
He remains the one historian of the eighteenth century whom modern
research has neither set aside nor threatened to set aside. We may
correct and improve from the stores which have been opened since
Gibbon's time; we may write again large parts of his story from other
and often truer and more wholesome points of view, but the work of
Gibbon as a whole, as the encyclopaedic history of 1300 years, as the
grandest of historical designs, carried out alike with wonderful power
and with wonderful accuracy, must ever keep its place. Whatever else
is read, Gibbon must be read too."

Gibbon's immense scheme did not unfold itself to him at once: he
passed through at least two distinct stages in the conception of his
work. The original idea had been confined to the decline and fall of
the city of Rome. Before he began to write, this had been expanded to
the fall of the empire of the West. The first volume, which we saw him
publish in the last chapter, was only an instalment, limited to the
accession of Constantine, through a doubt as to how his labours would
be received. The two following volumes, published in 1781, completed
his primitive plan. Then he paused exactly a year before he resolved
to carry on his work to its true end, the taking of Constantinople by
the Turks in 1453. The latter portion he achieved in three volumes
more, which he gave to the world on his fifty-first birthday, in 1788.
Thus the work naturally falls into two equal parts. It will be more
convenient to disregard in our remarks the interval of five years
which separated the publication of the first volume from its two
immediate companions. The first three volumes constitute a whole in
themselves, which we will now consider.

From the accession of Commodus, A.D. 180, to the last of the Western
Caesars, A.D. 476, three centuries elapsed. The first date is a real
point of departure, the commencement of a new stage of decay in the
empire. The second is a mere official record of the final
disappearance of a series of phantom sovereigns, whose vanishing was
hardly noticed. Between these limits the empire passed from the
autumnal calm of the An