GIBBON. 319 



the merits of his great work, the first thing that naturally 

 requires our attention is the plan. In the subject, as he 

 has defined or rather extended it, there is manifestly a 

 remarkable defect. There is no correctness in repre- 

 senting the decline of the Roman Empire as having 

 lasted from the age immediately following that of the 

 Antonines, at the end of the second century, to the 

 taking of Constantinople by the Turks in the middle of 

 the fifteenth a period of nearly thirteen hundred years. 

 It is true that the seat of power had been transferred 

 from Italy to the confines of Asia; but in order to make 

 the Roman Empire survive for six centuries and a half 

 the destruction of the Western Empire, it becomes neces- 

 sary to regard, and the author does accordingly regard, 

 Charlemagne as having formed a new empire in the 

 west, and his successors, first of the Carlovingian race and 

 then of the Capetian, as governing the Roman Empire. 

 Indeed, the unity of the subject, and its clear limitation, 

 would have been more perfectly maintained by making 

 the History terminate with the subversion of the Western 

 Empire by the conquest of Rome in the beginning of the 

 sixth century. The subject, as it has been continued 

 far beyond the original design, is, therefore, wanting in 

 unity; it is not so much the decline and fall of the 

 Roman Empire as the history of the whole world for the 

 first fourteen or fifteen centuries of the Christian era. 



In order to keep some order and arrangement in a 

 subject so vast and various, it becomes necessary either 

 to follow strictly the order of time in relating successive 

 events or to group those events, and chiefly by the 

 countries which were the scenes of them or to adopt a 

 middle course and to treat chronologically the events of 



