humanity, when its manifestly beneficial influence, can compel
even him, as it were, to fairness, and kindle his unguarded
eloquence to its usual fervor; but, in general, he soon relapses
into a frigid apathy; affects an ostentatiously severe
impartiality; notes all the faults of Christians in every age
with bitter and almost malignant sarcasm; reluctantly, and with
exception and reservation, admits their claim to admiration.
This inextricable bias appears even to influence his manner of
composition. While all the other assailants of the Roman empire,
whether warlike or religious, the Goth, the Hun, the Arab, the
Tartar, Alaric and Attila, Mahomet, and Zengis, and Tamerlane,
are each introduced upon the scene almost with dramatic animation
- their progress related in a full, complete, and unbroken
narrative - the triumph of Christianity alone takes the form of a
cold and critical disquisition. The successes of barbarous
energy and brute force call forth all the consummate skill of
composition; while the moral triumphs of Christian benevolence -
the tranquil heroism of endurance, the blameless purity, the
contempt of guilty fame and of honors destructive to the human
race, which, had they assumed the proud name of philosophy, would
have been blazoned in his brightest words, because they own
religion as their principle - sink into narrow asceticism. The
glories of Christianity, in short, touch on no chord in the heart
of the writer; his imagination remains unkindled; his words,
though they maintain their stately and measured march, have
become cool, argumentative, and inanimate. Who would obscure one
hue of that gorgeous coloring in which Gibbon has invested the
dying forms of Paganism, or darken one paragraph in his splendid
view of the rise and progress of Mahometanism? But who would not
have wished that the same equal justice had been done to