He says significantly in his Memoirs, that "he wished
that a pause, an interval, had been allowed for a serious revisal" of
the last three volumes, and there can be little doubt that this
chapter was one of the sources of his regrets. It is in fact a mere
tangle. The Second and the Third Crusades are so jumbled together,
that it is only a reader who knows the subject very well who can find
his way through the labyrinth. Gibbon seems at this point, a thing
very unusual with him, to have become impatient with his subject, and
to have wished to hurry over it. "A brief parallel," he says, "may
save the repetition of a tedious narrative." The result of this
expeditious method has been far from happy. It is the only occasion
where Gibbon has failed in his usual high finish and admirable
literary form.
Gibbon's style was at one period somewhat of a party question. Good
Christians felt a scruple in discerning any merits in the style of a
writer who had treated the martyrs of the early Church with so little
ceremony and generosity. On the other hand, those whose opinions
approached more or less to his, expatiated on the splendour and
majesty of his diction.
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