696 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences , Arts , and Letters. 
the President of the Royal Historical Society declared that 
the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was the “grandest 
historical achievement as yet accomplished on this planet.” 
Frederick Harrison wrote, “It is no personal paradox, but 
the judgment of all competent men, that the Decline and 
Fall of Gibbon is the most perfect historical composition that 
exists in any language.” The statements of these scholars 
are corroborated by the popular estimation of Gibbon’s 
work. Its vogue is extraordinary; more than a century and 
a quarter after its first publication it is still one of the best 
sellers. 
What has caused this? Partly his grasp of the subject 
and the style in which he presented it; surely not his defini¬ 
tion of history, which he describes as “little more than the 
register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” 
Yet this idea of history has persisted down to the present 
day, and disasters are better remembered than great achieve¬ 
ments of the human intellect which have made further 
progress possible. Many students can give the date of the 
great plague in London, of which Defoe wrote: 
“A dreadful plague in London was, 
In the year Sixty-Five, 
Which swept an hundred thousand souls 
Away: yet I alive.” 
Some can recall that the great fire came the following year. 
How many, even among scientists, know that these years, 
1665 and 1666, were the date of Newton’s great achieve¬ 
ments, the infinitesmal calculus and the law of gravitation? 
But Gibbon did not follow his definition; he wrote genetic 
history, and he laboriously dug out the facts from the docu¬ 
ments; so that his “superhuman accuracy” has become pro¬ 
verbial. This delving after the actual facts distinguished 
Gibbon in an age when the greatest writers were inclined to 
deal with the philosophy of history. 
The list of those who have written philosophies of history 
is an imposing one: St. Augustine, Otto of Freising, Boling- 
broke, Montesquieu, Herder, Hegel, to mention only a few. 
This tendency also has continued to the present day. One 
common form is “the assumption that a transcendental cause, 
Providence, guides the whole course of events towards an 
end which is known to God.” As an illustration may be given 
