was one of the sources of his regrets. It is in fact a mere
tangle. The Second and the Third Crusades are so jumbled together,
that it is only a reader who knows the subject very well who can find
his way through the labyrinth. Gibbon seems at this point, a thing
very unusual with him, to have become impatient with his subject, and
to have wished to hurry over it. "A brief parallel," he says, "may
save the repetition of a tedious narrative." The result of this
expeditious method has been far from happy. It is the only occasion
where Gibbon has failed in his usual high finish and admirable
literary form.

Gibbon's style was at one period somewhat of a party question. Good
Christians felt a scruple in discerning any merits in the style of a
writer who had treated the martyrs of the early Church with so little
ceremony and generosity. On the other hand, those whose opinions
approached more or less to his, expatiated on the splendour and
majesty of his diction. Archbishop Whately went out of his way in a
note to his _Logic_ to make a keen thrust at an author whom it was
well to depreciate whenever occasion served. "His way of writing," he
says, "reminds one of those persons who never dare look you full in
the face." Such criticisms are out of date now. The faults of Gibbon's
style are obvious enough, and its compensatory merits are not far to
seek. No one can overlook its frequent tumidity and constant want of
terseness. It lacks suppleness, ease, variety. It is not often
distinguished by happy selection of epithet, and seems to ignore all
delicacy of _nuance_. A prevailing grandiloquence, which easily slides
into pomposity, is its greatest blemish. The acute Porson saw this and
expressed it admirably. In the preface to his letters to Archdeacon
Travis, he says of Gibbon, "Though his style is in general correct and
elegant, he sometimes 'draws out the thread of his verbosity finer
than the staple of his argument.' In endeavouring to avoid vulgar
terms he too frequently dignifies trifles, and clothes common thoughts
in a splendid dress that would be rich enough for the noblest ideas.
In short we are too often reminded of that great man, Mr. Prig, the
auctioneer, whose manner was so inimitably fine that he had as much to
say on a ribbon as on a Raphael." It seems as if Gibbon had taken the
stilted tone of the old French tragedy for his model, rather than the
crisp and nervous prose of the best French writers. We are constant