orian: "I
augur--nor does my augury deceive me--that your histories will be
immortal: hence all the more do I desire to find a place in them."

To my mind, one of the most charming things in historical literature is
the praise which one great historian bestows upon another. Gibbon
speaks of "the discerning eye" and "masterly pencil of Tacitus,--the
first of historians who applied the science of philosophy to the study
of facts," "whose writings will instruct the last generations of
mankind." He has produced an immortal work, "every sentence of which is
pregnant with the deepest observations and most lively images." I
mention Gibbon, for it is more than a strong probability that in
diligence, accuracy, and love of truth he is the equal of Tacitus. A
common edition of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire is that with notes by Dean Milman, Guizot, and Dr. Smith.
Niebuhr, Villemain, and Sir James Mackintosh are each drawn upon for
criticism. Did ever such a fierce light beat upon a history? With what
keen relish do the annotators pounce upon mistakes or inaccuracies, and
in that portion of the work which ends with the fall of the Western
Empire how few do they find! Would Tacitus stand the supreme test
better? There is, so far as I know, only one case in which we may
compare his Annals with an original record. On bronze tablets found at
Lyons in the sixteenth century is engraved the same speech made by the
Emperor Claudius to the Senate that Tacitus reports. "Tacitus and the
tablets," writes Professor Jebb, "disagree hopelessly in language and in
nearly all the detail, but agree in the general line of argument."
Gibbon's work has richly deserved its life of more than one hundred
years, a period which I believe no other modern history has endured.
Niebuhr, in a course of lectures at Bonn, in 1829, said that Gibbon's
"work will never be excelled." At the Gibbon Centenary Commemoration in
London, in 1894, many distinguished men, among whom the Church had a
distinct representation, gathered together to pay honor to him who, in
the words of Frederic Harrison, had written "the most perfect book that
English prose (outside its fiction) possesses." Mommsen, prevented by
age and work from being present, sent his tribute. No one, he said,
would in the future be able to read the history of the Roman Empire
unless he read Edward Gibbon. The Times, in a leader devoted to the
subject, apparently expressed the general v