In fact it is not doing them injustice to say that
these eminent men were a sort of modern Livies, chiefly occupied with
the rhetorical part of their work, and not over inclined to waste
their time in ungrateful digging in the deep mines of historic lore.
Obviously the place was open for a writer who should unite all the
broad spirit of comprehensive survey, with the thorough and minute
patience of a Benedictine; whose subject, mellowed by long brooding,
should have sought him rather than he it; whose whole previous course
of study had been an unconscious preparation for one great effort
which was to fill his life. When Gibbon sat down to write his book,
the man had been found who united these difficult conditions.
The decline and fall of Rome is the greatest event in history. It
occupied a larger portion of the earth's surface, it affected the
lives and fortunes of a larger number of human beings, than any other
revolution on record. For it was essentially one, though it took
centuries to consummate, and though it had for its theatre the
civilised world. Great evolutions and catastrophes happened before it,
and have happened since, but nothing which can compare with it in
volume and mere physical size.
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