More on Decline and Fall.<\/i><\/p>\n
“I finished ‘Decline and Fall’ this evening. It is the third time I have read it…It is a monumental piece of work. I know of no historian so coldly impersonal as Gibbon. He seems more like a machine recording history … This makes for the proper impartiality; but it is also largely accountable for what, after all, must be called the monotony of his style. Almost the only portions of his history in which we get a glimpse of Gibbon himself — the intellect behind the machine — are in his famous chapters on Christianity and his sprinkling of sly spicy smutty stories. Naturally these — the chapters, I mean — are therefore the most interesting part of the work … Gibbon doesn’t overdo but his smirk rather gives the effect of a Satyr leering suddenly around the columns of Karnak.”<\/p>\n