finished work is as overwhelming as the Palace of Versailles when occupied, although
his manner is sometimes of the kind which led to Versailles no longer being occupied.
If we carefully trace the distance from the wall of Antoninus to Rome, and from thence
to Jerusalem, it will be found that the great chain of communication from the northwest
to the southeast point of the empire was drawn out to the length of four thousand and
eighty Roman miles. The public roads were accurately divided by mile stones and ran in
a direct line from one city to another with very little respect for the obstacles either of
nature or private property. Mountains were perforated, and bold arches thrown over the
broadest and most rapid streams. The middle part of the road was raised into a terrace
which commanded the adjacent country, consisted of several strata of sand, gravel, and
cement, and was paved with large stones, or, in some places near the capital, with
granite.Gibbon’s miles are Roman millia passuum(‘thousand paces’) not English miles;
he writes here not as an English but as a Roman historian. More English is his expla-
nation of the decision not to conquer the Picts beyond the Antonine wall: ‘The
masters of the fairest and most wealthy climates of the globe turned with contempt
from gloomy hills assailed by the winter tempest, from lakes concealed in a blue
mist, and from cold and lonely heaths over which the deer of the forest were chased
by a troop of naked barbarians.’ He pauses in a geographical survey of eastern
provinces to say that ‘Phoenicia and Palestine will forever live in the memory of
mankind, since America as well as Europe has received letters from the one and reli-
gion from the other.’ Antithesis as a way of thinking: countries linked by Ps, conti-
nents by vowels; literature weighed against religion. Chapter XV, ‘A candid but
rational enquiry into the progress and establishment of Christianity’, considers ‘by
what means the Christian faith obtained so remarkable a victory over the established
religions of the earth’. Gibbon held that religion and barbarism undermined the
Empire.One of Gibbon’s editors says that he was a moderate sceptic, ‘quite willing
to acc ept the existence of a Deity, but with no stipulations about the precise mechan-
ics of the operation of the Divine Will’. Gibbon has lasted surprisingly well as
history,although his irony may make his readers suspect that they themselves may
be barbarians.
Edmund Burke
It is not for his ideas on the sublime, mentioned above, that Edmund Burke
(1729–1797) is generally remembered, but for his Reflections on the Revolution in
Fr ance (1790),with its image of Marie Antoinette undefended, in the land of
gallantry, by a single French sword. He opposed the atheism and extremism of the
revolutionaries, and offered a conservative idea of society as made up of ‘little
platoons’ of family, locality and other natural associations, and as adapting and
improving organically rather than by the application of universal ideas. He stood for
the liberation of the House of Commons, of Ireland, of Catholics and of the
American colonies, and had opened for the prosecution against Warren Hastings,
accused of corruption and ruthless government in British India. As a reformer,
Burke opposed revolution. The great issue made him define his assumption that
society was a living thing rather than a model run by contract or by mechanism or
by ideas.Matthew Arnold thought Burke ‘so great, because, almost alone in England,
he brings thought to bear upon politics, he saturates politics with thought’. He influ-
enced both Wordsworth and Coleridge, and many who were not poets.
THE AGE OF JOHNSON 219