His fine tact warned him that the tumult and thunder of
the final ruin must not be the last sounds to strike the ear. A
resolution of the discord was needed; a soft chorale should follow the
din and lead to a mellow _adagio_ close. And this he does with supreme
skill. With ill-suppressed disgust, he turns from New to Old Home.
"Constantinople no longer appertains to the Roman historian--nor shall
I enumerate the civil and religious edifices that were profaned or
erected by its Turkish masters." Amid the decayed temples and
mutilated beauty of the Eternal City, he moves down to a melodious and
pathetic conclusion--piously visits the remaining fragments of ancient
splendour and art, deplores and describes the ravages wrought by time,
and still more by man, and recurring once again to the scene of his
first inspiration, bids farewell to the Roman empire among the ruins
of the Capitol.

We have hitherto spoken in terms of warm, though perhaps not excessive
eulogy of this great work. But praise would lack the force of
moderation and equipoise, if allusion were not made to some of its
defects. The pervading defect of it all has been already referred to
in a preceding chapter--an inadequate conception of society as an
organism, living and growing, like other organisms, according to
special laws of its own. In these brilliant volumes on the Middle
Ages, the special problems which that period suggests are not stated,
far less solved; they are not even suspected. The feudal polity, the
Catholic Church, the theocratic supremacy of the Popes, considered as
institutions which the historian is called upon to estimate and judge;
the gradual dissolution of both feudalism and Catholicism, brought
about by the spread of industry in the temporal order and of science
in the spiritual order, are not even referred to. Many more topics
might be added to this list of weighty omissions. It would be needless
to say that no blame attaches to Gibbon for neglecting views of
history which had not emerged in his time, if there were not persons
who, forgetting the slow progress of knowledge, are apt to ascribe the
defects of a book to incompetence in its author. If Gibbon's
conception of the Middle Ages seems to us inadequate now, it is
because since his time our conceptions of society in that and in all
periods have been much enlarged. We may be quite certain that if
Gibbon had had our experience, no one would have seen the
imperfections of particul