cold resignation upon that which was once but is no longer. Both
ponder the question, "How could the disaster have been averted? How
could the decline of Rome have been stayed?" Tacitus is the greater
poet--more penetrating in vision, a greater master of his medium,
profounder in his insight into the human heart. But a common
atmosphere of elegy pervades the work of both, and if Gibbon again and
again forgets the inquiry with which he set out, the charm of his work
gains thereby. A pensive melancholy akin to that of Petrarch's
_Trionfi_, or the _Antiquites de Rome_ of Joachim du Bellay, redeems
from monotony, by the emotion it communicates, the over-stately march
of many a balanced period.[8] But it were as vain to seek in Tasso for
a philosophic theory of the Crusades as seek in Gibbon a philosophic
theory of the decline of empires.

His artistic purpose was strengthened to something like a prophetic
purpose by the environment of his age, the incidents of his life, and
the bent of his own intellect. He combats the same enemy as Voltaire
waged truceless war upon--the subtle, intangible, omnipresent spirit of
insincerity, hypocrisy, and superstition, from which the bigotry and
religious oppression of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
derived their power. And Gibbon's indebtedness to Voltaire is amazing.
There is scarcely a living conception in the _Decline and Fall_ which
cannot be traced to that nimble, varied, and all-illuminating spirit.
Even the ironic method of the two renowned chapters was prompted by a
section in the _Essai sur les Moeurs_.

Thus to the theory of Tacitus, the departure from the ancient
simplicity of life, Gibbon adds the theory of Zosimus.[9] With Zosimus
he affirms that the triumph of Christianism sealed the fate of Rome,
and in the Emperor Julian Gibbon finds the same heroic but ill-starred
defender of the past, as Tacitus found in the unfortunate Germanicus.
This conception informs Gibbon's work throughout, prompting alike the
furtive, malignant, or tasteless sketches of the great Pontiffs and the
great Caesars, and the finish, the studied care, the vivid detail
lavished upon the portraits of their enemies. Half-seriously,
half-smiling at his own enthusiasm, he seems to discern in Mohammed, in
Saladin, and the Ottoman power, the avengers of Julian and the Rome of
the Antonines.

And thus Ruskin, inspired by a mood of his great teacher, traces the
decline of Venice to i