TO
The Honourable Mrs. Robert O'Brien.
[_]
NOTE.
‘History as written,’ etc., p. xxvi, line 13—
Coleridge expresses himself thus on Gibbon's ‘Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire’:
‘No distinct knowledge of the actual state of the empire can
be obtained from Gibbon's rhetorical sketches. He takes notice
of nothing but what may produce an effect; he skips on from
eminence to eminence, without ever taking you through the
valleys between. ... When I read a chapter in Gibbon, I seem
to be looking through a luminous haze or fog; figures come and
go, I know not how or why, all larger than life, or distorted, or
discoloured. Nothing is real, vivid, true; all is scenical, and,
as it were, exhibited by candle-light. And that poor scepticism
which Gibbon mistook for Socratic philosophy has led him to
misstate and mistake the character and influence of Christianity
in a way which even an avowed infidel or atheist would not and
could not have done. Gibbon was a man of immense reading,
but he had no philosophy.’—Coleridge's ‘Table Talk,’ vol. ii.
pp. 231, 232.
When will the Christian, the philosophical, and the
true history of the ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire’ be written?
