426 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION

As the present writer was rereading this passage of Gibbon's history
on the i ith December, 1950, his mind's eye conjured up a Late Medieval
Florentine picture of saved souls in Heaven leaning lazily over a marble
balustrade in order to make their bliss full and perfect by gazing down
upon the torments of the damned in Hell; and, among the participants
in this Satanic celestial recreation, a dreaming mind's roving glance
singled out one figure whose ungainliness would have made it con-
spicuous, even if the uncouth effect had not been enhanced by an out-
landishly un-medieval costume. There, in an uncongenial Dantesque
Paradise to which he had unwittingly sentenced himself by embracing
the irrational belief that 'History' was 'now at an end', stood Gibbon, in
silver-buckled shoes, knee-breeches, tie-wig, and tricornej looking down
on wretched creatures, born under a different star, who had been
floundering in the turbid waters of History in days before the flow of
Time's 'ever rolling stream' had been cut off, for the benefit of the
eighteenth-century English historian and his kind, by the advent of their
secular Millennium in A.D. 1688.

In a pre-Gibbonian Early Modern Age a renaissance of Hellenic arts
and letters had not been able to prevent an obstinately fanatical religious
enthusiasm from beheading a King of England in AJX 1649 or from
defenestrating a Caesarean Majesty's envoys in A.D. 1618, or from
celebrating Saint Bartholomew's Day, A.D. 1572, by a massacre of the
adherents of one of two rival sects. In a pre-Modern 'Gothic Age'—into
which Gibbon's historical vision ran together the Western 'Middle Ages'
(currebant AJ>. 1075-1475) and the Western 'Dark Ages' (currebant
A JX 675-1075) and a post-Hellenic social interregnum (currebat A.D. 375-
675)—the human werewolf's inveterate crimes, follies, and misfortunes1
had not even been relieved by a renascent gleam of intellectual and
aesthetic light. That tale of eleven bestial centuries had been told off
under the joint reign of Barbarism and Religion, whose triumph had
been Gibbon's theme ;2 and, for two centuries after the official deposition
af Barbarism by fifteenth-century Italian Hellenists, Religion had not
?nly remained on the throne herself but had contrived to serve as a most
effective deputy for her nominally dethroned colleague. Thus the history
>f the decline and fall of the Roman Empire—which Gibbon had pro-
lounced to be 'the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history
>f Mankind'3—had been followed by no less than thirteen centuries, all
:old, in which History had persistently run true to her Gibbonian type;
md then suddenly, rather less than a hundred years before the time at
which Gibbon was writing, we are invited to believe that the noisome
low had inexplicably come to a halt and had left the historian and his
lontemporaries securely high and dry.

'God, I thank Thee that I am not as other men are.'4 Gibbon's implicit
aith in the uniqueness of his own advantageously distinguished genera-
ioa's destiny is a classic example of the egocentric illusion;5 and we are

* See Gibbon, E.: The History of the Decline and FaB. of the Roman Empire, chap, iii
HI echo of Bayle, P.: Dietumnaire, 4th ed. (Rotterdam 1720, Bohm, 4 vois.), iii. 1899 b).

* See Gibbon, op. cit., chap. 1™,

.........e first sentence of the last paragraph of this last chapter of the

4 Luke xviii. n. s See I. i. 159.