In short we are too often reminded of that great man, Mr. Prig, the
auctioneer, whose manner was so inimitably fine that he had as much to
say on a ribbon as on a Raphael." It seems as if Gibbon had taken the
stilted tone of the old French tragedy for his model, rather than the
crisp and nervous prose of the best French writers. We are constantly
offended by a superfine diction lavished on barbarous chiefs and rough
soldiers of the Lower Empire, which almost reproduces the high-flown
rhetoric in which Corneille's and Racine's characters address each
other. Such phrases as the "majesty of the throne," "the dignity of
the purple," the "wisdom of the senate," recur with a rather jarring
monotony, especially when the rest of the narrative is designed to
show that there was no majesty nor dignity nor wisdom involved in the
matter. We feel that the writer was thinking more of his sonorous
sentence than of the real fact. On the other hand, nothing but a want
of candour or taste can lead any one to overlook the rare and great
excellences of Gibbon's style. First of all, it is singularly correct:
a rather common merit now, but not common in his day.
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