He remains the one historian of the eighteenth century whom modern
research has neither set aside nor threatened to set aside. We may
correct and improve from the stores which have been opened since
Gibbon's time; we may write again large parts of his story from other
and often truer and more wholesome points of view, but the work of
Gibbon as a whole, as the encyclopaedic history of 1300 years, as the
grandest of historical designs, carried out alike with wonderful power
and with wonderful accuracy, must ever keep its place. Whatever else
is read, Gibbon must be read too."
Gibbon's immense scheme did not unfold itself to him at once: he
passed through at least two distinct stages in the conception of his
work. The original idea had been confined to the decline and fall of
the city of Rome. Before he began to write, this had been expanded to
the fall of the empire of the West. The first volume, which we saw him
publish in the last chapter, was only an instalment, limited to the
accession of Constantine, through a doubt as to how his labours would
be received. The two following volumes, published in 1781, completed
his primitive plan.
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