who equally
listened to the freedom of his conversation."[107] Gibbon's idea of the
happiest period of mankind is interesting and characteristic. "If," he
wrote, "a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world
during which the condition of the human race was most happy and
prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from
the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus."[108] This period
was from A.D. 96 to 180, covering the reigns of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian,
Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius. Professor Carter, in a lecture in
Rome in 1907, drew, by a modern comparison, a characterization of the
first three named. When we were studying in Germany, he said, we were
accustomed to sum up the three emperors, William I, Frederick III, and
William II, as der greise Kaiser, der weise Kaiser, und der reise
Kaiser. The characterizations will fit well Nerva, Trajan, and Hadrian.
Gibbon speaks of the "restless activity" of Hadrian, whose life "was
almost a perpetual journey," and who during his reign visited every
province of his empire.[109]

A casual remark of Gibbon's, "Corruption [is] the most infallible
symptom of constitutional liberty,"[110] shows the sentiment of the
eighteenth century. The generality of the history becomes specific in a
letter to his father, who has given him hopes of a seat in Parliament.
"This seat," so Edward Gibbon wrote, "according to the custom of our
venal country was to be bought, and fifteen hundred pounds were
mentioned as the price of purchase."[111]

Gibbon anticipated Captain Mahan. In speaking of a naval battle between
the fleet of Justinian and that of the Goths in which the galleys of the
Eastern empire gained a signal victory, he wrote, "The Goths affected to
depreciate an element in which they were unskilled; but their own
experience confirmed the truth of a maxim, that the master of the sea
will always acquire the dominion of the land."[112] But Gibbon's
anticipation was one of the frequent cases where the same idea has
occurred to a number of men of genius, as doubtless Captain Mahan was
not aware of this sentence any more than he was of Bacon's and Raleigh's
epitomes of the theme which he has so originally and brilliantly
treated.[113]

No modern historian has been the subject of so much critical comment as
Gibbon. I do not know how it will compare in volume with either of the
similar examinations of Thucydides and Tacitus; but the criticis