SOURCE: Quinn, Arthur. “‘Meditating Tacitus’: Gibbon's Adaptation to an Eighteenth-Century Audience.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70, no. 1 (February 1984): 53-68.

In the following essay, Quinn argues that Gibbon's Decline and Fall was written in part to give wisdom to his English contemporaries so that England, an imperial power, would not make the same mistakes the Romans had.

I

“It was Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amid the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.” This is Edward Gibbon's own, now famous account of the origin of the history for which he is still remembered, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In 1764 his mind should well have been on the fate of great empires. Gibbon had recently been...