language of his recent French editor, M. Guizot:--

[Footnote 101: A considerable portion of this preface has already appeared
before us public in the Quarterly Review.]

"The gradual decline of the most extraordinary dominion which has
ever invaded and oppressed the world; the fall of that immense empire,
erected on the ruins of so many kingdoms, republics, and states both
barbarous and civilized; and forming in its turn, by its dismemberment,
a multitude of states, republics, and kingdoms; the annihilation of the
religion of Greece and Rome; the birth and the progress of the two new
religions which have shared the most beautiful regions of the earth; the
decrepitude of the ancient world, the spectacle of its expiring glory
and degenerate manners; the infancy of the modern world, the picture of
its first progress, of the new direction given to the mind and character
of man--such a subject must necessarily fix the attention and excite
the interest of men, who cannot behold with indifference those memorable
epochs, during which, in the fine language of Corneille--

'Un grand destin commence, un grand destin s'acheve.'"

This extent and harmony of design is unquestionably that which
distinguishes the work of Gibbon from all other great historical
compositions. He has first bridged the abyss between ancient and modern
times, and connected together the two great worlds of history. The great
advantage which the classical historians possess over those of modern
times is in unity of plan, of course greatly facilitated by the narrower
sphere to which their researches were confined. Except Herodotus, the
great historians of Greece--we exclude the more modern compilers, like
Diodorus Siculus--limited themselves to a single period, or at 'east to
the contracted sphere of Grecian affairs. As far as the Barbarians
trespassed within the Grecian boundary, or were necessarily mingled up
with Grecian politics, they were admitted into the pale of Grecian
history; but to Thucydides and to Xenophon, excepting in the Persian
inroad of the latter, Greece was the world. Natural unity confined their
narrative almost to chronological order, the episodes were of rare
occurrence and extremely brief. To the Roman historians the course was
equally clear and defined. Rome was their centre of unity; and the
uniformity with which the circle of the Roman dominion spread around,
the regularity with which their civil polity expanded, forced, as it