ls, and
modes of thought and feeling turned instinctively to the Continent.

In one respect this foreign type was of great advantage to his work.
Gibbon excels all other English historians in symmetry, proportion,
perspective, and arrangement, which are also the pre-eminent and
characteristic merits of the best French literature. We find in his
writing nothing of the great miscalculations of space that were made by
such writers as Macaulay and Buckle; nothing of the awkward repetitions,
the confused arrangement, the semi-detached and disjointed episodes that
mar the beauty of many other histories of no small merit. Vast and
multifarious as are the subjects which he has treated, his work is a
great whole, admirably woven in all its parts. On the other hand, his
foreign taste may perhaps be seen in his neglect of the Saxon element,
which is the most vigorous and homely element in English prose. Probably
in no other English writer does the Latin element so entirely
predominate. Gibbon never wrote an unmeaning and very seldom an obscure
sentence; he could always paint with sustained and stately eloquence an
illustrious character or a splendid scene: but he was wholly wanting in
the grace of simplicity, and a monotony of glitter and of mannerism is
the great defect of his style. He possessed, to a degree which even
Tacitus and Bacon had hardly surpassed, the supreme literary gift of
condensation, and it gives an admirable force and vividness to his
narrative; but it is sometimes carried to excess. Not unfrequently it is
attained by an excessive allusiveness, and a wide knowledge of the
subject is needed to enable the reader to perceive the full import and
meaning conveyed or hinted at by a mere turn of phrase. But though his
style is artificial and pedantic, and greatly wanting in flexibility, it
has a rare power of clinging to the memory, and it has profoundly
influenced English prose. That excellent judge Cardinal Newman has said
of Gibbon, "I seem to trace his vigorous condensation and peculiar
rhythm at every turn in the literature of the present day."

It is not necessary to relate here in any detail the later events of the
life of Gibbon. There was his enlistment as captain in the Hampshire
militia. It involved two and a half years of active service, extending
from May 1760 to December 1762; and as Gibbon afterwards acknowledged,
if it interrupted his studies and brought him into very uncongenial
duties and societies,