Edward Gibbon, son of a Hampshire gentleman, was born at Putney, near London, April 27, 1737.  After a preliminary education at Westminster, and fourteen “unprofitable” months at Magdalen College, Oxford, a whim to join the Roman church led to his banishment to Lausanne, where he spent five years, and acquired a mastery of the French language, formed his taste for literary expression, and settled his religious doubts in a profound scepticism.  He served some years in the militia, and was a member of parliament.  It was in 1764, while musing amidst, the ruins of the Capitol of Rome, that the idea of writing “The Decline and Fall” of the city first started into his mind.  The vast work was completed in 1787.  “A Study in Literature,” written in French, and his “Miscellaneous Works,” published after his death, which include “The Memoirs of his Life and Writings,” complete the list of his literary labours.  He died of dropsy on January 16, 1794.  The portion of the work which is epitomized here covers the period from the reign of Commodus to the era of Charlemagne, and includes the famous portion of the work dealing with the growth of the Christian church.

I.—­Rome, Mistress of the World

In the second century of the Christian era, the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind.  On the death of Augustus, that emperor bequeathed, as a valuable legacy to his successors, the advice of confining the empire within those limits which nature seemed to have placed as its permanent bulwarks and boundaries—­on the west the Atlantic Ocean, the Rhine and Danube on the north, the Euphrates on the east, and towards the south the sandy deserts of Arabia and Africa.  The subsequent settlement of Great Britain and Dacia supplied the two exceptions to the precepts of Augustus, if we omit the transient conquests of Trajan in the east, which were renounced by Hadrian.

By maintaining the dignity of the empire, without attempting to enlarge its limits, the early emperors caused the Roman name to be revered among the most remote nations of the earth.  The terror of their arms added weight and dignity to their moderation.  They preserved peace by a constant preparation for war.  The soldiers, though drawn from the meanest, and very frequently from the most profligate, of mankind, and no longer, as in the days of the ancient republic, recruited from Rome herself, were preserved in their allegiance to the emperor, and their invincibility before the enemy, by the influences of superstition, inflexible discipline, and the hopes of reward.  The peace establishment of the Roman army numbered some 375,000 men, divided into thirty legions, who were confined, not within the walls of fortified cities, which the Romans considered as the refuge of pusillanimity, but upon the confines of the empire; while 20,000 chosen soldiers, distinguished by the titles of City Cohorts and Praetorian Guards, watched over the safety of the monarch and the capitol.