commands attention, always conveys its meaning with emphatic
energy, describes with singular breadth and fidelity, and
generalizes with unrivalled felicity of expression; all these
high qualifications have secured, and seem likely to secure, its
permanent place in historic literature.

This vast design of Gibbon, the magnificent whole into which
he has cast the decay and ruin of the ancient civilization, the
formation and birth of the new order of things, will of itself,
independent of the laborious execution of his immense plan,
render "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" an
unapproachable subject to the future historian: ^* in the
eloquent language of his recent French editor, M. Guizot: -
[Footnote * A considerable portion of this preface has already
appeared before us public in the Quarterly Review.]

"The gradual decline of the most extraordinary dominion
which has ever invaded and oppressed the world; the fall of that
immense empire, erected on the ruins of so many kingdoms,
republics, and states both barbarous and civilized; and forming
in its turn, by its dismemberment, a multitude of states,
republics, and kingdoms; the annihilation of the religion of
Greece and Rome; the birth and the progress of the two new
religions which have shared the most beautiful regions of the
earth; the decrepitude of the ancient world, the spectacle of its
expiring glory and degenerate manners; the infancy of the modern
world, the picture of its first progress, of the new direction
given to the mind and character of man - such a subject must
necessarily fix the attention and excite the interest of men, who
cannot behold with indifference those memorable epochs, during