Next to my Johnsoniana are my Gibbons—­two editions, if you please, for my old complete one being somewhat crabbed in the print I could not resist getting a set of Bury’s new six-volume presentment of the History.  In reading that book you don’t want to be handicapped in any way.  You want fair type, clear paper, and a light volume.  You are not to read it lightly, but with some earnestness of purpose and keenness for knowledge, with a classical atlas at your elbow and a note-book hard by, taking easy stages and harking back every now and then to keep your grip of the past and to link it up with what follows.  There are no thrills in it.  You won’t be kept out of your bed at night, nor will you forget your appointments during the day, but you will feel a certain sedate pleasure in the doing of it, and when it is done you will have gained something which you can never lose—­something solid, something definite, something that will make you broader and deeper than before.

Were I condemned to spend a year upon a desert island and allowed only one book for my companion, it is certainly that which I should choose.  For consider how enormous is its scope, and what food for thought is contained within those volumes.  It covers a thousand years of the world’s history, it is full and good and accurate, its standpoint is broadly philosophic, its style dignified.  With our more elastic methods we may consider his manner pompous, but he lived in an age when Johnson’s turgid periods had corrupted our literature.  For my own part I do not dislike Gibbon’s pomposity.  A paragraph should be measured and sonorous if it ventures to describe the advance of a Roman legion, or the debate of a Greek Senate.  You are wafted upwards, with this lucid and just spirit by your side upholding and instructing you.  Beneath you are warring nations, the clash of races, the rise and fall of dynasties, the conflict of creeds.  Serene you float above them all, and ever as the panorama flows past, the weighty measured unemotional voice whispers the true meaning of the scene into your ear.

It is a most mighty story that is told.  You begin with a description of the state of the Roman Empire when the early Caesars were on the throne, and when it was undisputed mistress of the world.  You pass down the line of the Emperors with their strange alternations of greatness and profligacy, descending occasionally to criminal lunacy.  When the Empire went rotten it began at the top, and it took centuries to corrupt the man behind the spear.  Neither did a religion of peace affect him much, for, in spite of the adoption of Christianity, Roman history was still written in blood.  The new creed had only added a fresh cause of quarrel and violence to the many which already existed, and the wars of angry nations were mild compared to those of excited sectaries.