ar sides of his work as we now have it more
clearly than he.

Laying aside, therefore, reflexions of this kind as irrelevant and
unjust, we may ask whether there are any other faults which may fairly
be found with him. One must admit that there are. After all, they are
not very important.

(1.) Striking as is his account of Justinian's reign, it has two
blemishes. First, the offensive details about the vices of Theodora.
Granting them to be well authenticated, which they are not, it was
quite unworthy of the author and his subject to soil his pages with
such a _chronique scandaleuse_. The defence which he sets up in his
Memoirs, that he is "justified in painting the manners of the times,
and that the vices of Theodora form an essential feature in the reign
and character of Justinian," cannot be admitted. First, we are not
sure that the vices existed, and were not the impure inventions of a
malignant calumniator. Secondly, Gibbon is far from painting the
manners of the time as a moralist or an historian; he paints them with
a zest for pruriency worthy of Bayle or Brantome. It was an occasion
for a wise scepticism to register grave doubts as to the infamous
stories of Procopius. A rehabilitation of Theodora is not a theme
calculated to provoke enthusiasm, and is impossible besides from the
entire want of adequate evidence. But a thoughtful writer would not
have lost his time, if he referred to the subject at all, in pointing
out the moral improbability of the current accounts. He might have
dwelt on the _unsupported_ testimony of the only witness, the
unscrupulous Procopius, whom Gibbon himself convicts on another
subject of flagrant mendacity. But he would have been especially slow
to believe that a woman who had led the life of incredible profligacy
he has described, would, in consequence of "some vision either of
sleep or fancy," in which future exaltation was promised to her,
assume "like a skilful actress, a more decent character, relieve her
poverty by the laudable industry of spinning wool, and affect a life
of chastity and solitude in a small house, which she afterwards
changed into a magnificent temple." Magdalens have been converted, no
doubt, from immoral living, but not by considerations of astute
prudence suggested by day-dreams of imperial greatness. Gibbon might
have thought of the case of Madame de Maintenon, and how her
reputation fared in the hands of the vindictive courtiers of
Versailles; how a woma