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Outlines of English and American Literature
Gibbon
by Long, William J.
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Of all the historical works of the age, and their name was legion, only one
survives with something of its original vitality, standing the double test
of time and scholarship. This is The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire (1776), a work which remained famous for a century, and which
still has its admiring readers. It was written by Edward Gibbon
(1737-1794), who belonged to the Literary Club that gathered about Johnson,
and who cultivated his style, he tells us, first by adopting the dictator's
rounded periods, and then practicing them "till they moved to flutes and
hautboys."
The scope of Gibbon's work is enormous. It begins with the Emperor Trajan
(A.D. 98) and carries us through the convulsions of a dying civilization,
the descent of the Barbarians on Rome, the spread of Christianity, the
Crusades, the rise of Mohammedanism,--through all the confused history of
thirteen centuries, ending with the capture of Constantinople by the Turks,
in 1453. The mind that could grasp such vast and chaotic materials, arrange
them in orderly sequence and resent them as in a gorgeous panorama, moves
us to wonder. To be sure, there are many things to criticize in Gibbon's
masterpiece,--the author's love of mere pageants; his materialism; his
inability to understand religious movements, or even religious motives; his
lifeless figures, which move as if by mechanical springs,--but one who
reads the Decline and Fall may be too much impressed by the
evidences of scholarship, of vast labor, of genius even, to linger over
faults. It is a "monumental" work, most interesting to those who admire
monuments; and its style is the perfection of that oratorical, Johnsonese
style which was popular in England in 1776, and which, half a century
later, found its best American mouthpiece in Daniel Webster. The influence
of Gibbon may still be seen in the orators and historians who, lacking the
charm of simplicity, clothe even their platitudes in high-sounding phrases.
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