ct he has hardly a full rival in literature. The
quality which places him not only in the first rank of historians, but
in a class by himself, and makes him greater than the greatest, lies
in his supreme power of moulding into lucid and coherent unity, the
manifold and rebellious mass of his multitudinous materials, of
coercing his divergent topics into such order that they seem
spontaneously to grow like branches out of one stem, clear and visible
to the mind. There is something truly epic in these latter volumes.
Tribes, nations, and empires are the characters; one after another
they come forth like Homeric heroes, and do their mighty deeds before
the assembled armies. The grand and lofty chapters on Justinian; on
the Arabs; on the Crusades, have a rounded completeness, coupled with
such artistic subordination to the main action, that they read more
like cantos of a great prose poem than the ordinary staple of
historical composition. It may well be questioned whether there is
another instance of such high literary form and finish, coupled with
such vast erudition. And two considerations have to be borne in mind,
which heighten Gibbon's merit in this respect. (1.) Almost the whole
of his subject had been as yet untouched by any preceding writer of
eminence, and he had no stimulus or example from his precursors. He
united thus in himself the two characters of pioneer and artist. (2.)
The barbarous and imperfect nature of the materials with which he
chiefly had to work,--dull inferior writers, whose debased style was
their least defect. A historian who has for his authorities masters of
reason and language such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, and Tacitus
is borne up by their genius; apt quotation and translation alone
suffice to produce considerable effects; or in the case of subjects
taken from modern times, weighty state papers, eloquent debates, or
finished memoirs supply ample materials for graphic narrative. But
Gibbon had little but dross to deal with. Yet he has smelted and cast
it into the grand shapes we see.

The fourth volume is nearly confined to the reign, or rather epoch, of
Justinian,--a magnificent subject, which he has painted in his
loftiest style of gorgeous narrative. The campaigns of Belisarius and
Narses are related with a clearness and vigour that make us feel that
Gibbon's merits as a military historian have not been quite
sufficiently recognised. He had from the time of his service in the
militi