" And yet Gibbon had read the
Capitularies. The struggle and care of the hero to master in some
degree the wide welter of barbarism surging around him, he never
recognised. It is a spot on Gibbon's fame.
Dean Milman considers that Gibbon's account of the Crusades is the
least accurate and satisfactory chapter in his history, and "that he
has here failed in that lucid arrangement which in general gives
perspicuity to his most condensed and crowded narratives." This blame
seems to be fully merited, if restricted to the second of the two
chapters which Gibbon has devoted to the Crusades. The fifty-eighth
chapter, in which he treats of the First Crusade, leaves nothing to be
desired. It is not one of his best chapters, though it is quite up to
his usually high level. But the fifty-ninth chapter, it must be owned,
is not only weak, but what is unexampled elsewhere in him, confused
and badly written. It is not, as in the case of Charlemagne, a
question of imperfect appreciation of a great man or epoch; it is a
matter of careless and slovenly presentation of a period which he had
evidently mastered with his habitual thoroughness, but, owing to the
rapidity with which he composed his last volume, he did not do full
justice to it.
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