No law of progress
applied to it. Not even time-sequences -- the last refuge of
helpless historians -- had value for it. The Forum no more led to
the Vatican than the Vatican to the Forum. Rienzi, Garibaldi,
Tiberius Gracchus, Aurelian might be mixed up in any relation of
time, along with a thousand more, and never lead to a sequence.
The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new
religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same
doctrine for a thousand years without finding in the entire
history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.
Of course both priests and evolutionists bitterly denied this
heresy, but what they affirmed or denied in 1860 had very little
importance indeed for 1960. Anarchy lost no ground meanwhile. The
problem became only the more fascinating. Probably it was more
vital in May, 1860, than it had been in October, 1764, when the
idea of writing the Decline and Fall of the city first started to
the mind of Gibbon, "in the close of the evening, as I sat musing
in the Church of the Zoccolanti or Franciscan Friars, while they
were singing Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, on the ruins of
the Capitol." Murray's Handbook had the grace to quote this
passage from Gibbon's "Autobiography," which led Adams more than
once to sit at sunset on the steps of the Church of Santa Maria
di Ara Coeli, curiously wondering that not an inch had been
gained by Gibbon -- or all the historians since -- towards
explaining the Fall.
Pages:
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152