Gibbon was born in 1737, a young man of delicate health and fairly good fortune; he had a partial and interrupted education at Oxford, and then he completed his studies in Geneva; on the whole his outlook was French and cosmopolitan rather than British, and he was much under the intellectual influence of that great Frenchman who is best known under the name of Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire, 1694 1778). ... "This awful revolution," wrote Gibbon of the Western collapse, "may be usefully applied to the useful instruction of the present age. ... The Barbarian world was agitated by th...

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