Yet I have two footmen in handsome liveries behind my coach, and my apartment is hung with damask." The remainder of his life in London has nothing important.

He persevered assiduously with his history, and had two more quartos ready in 1781.

They were received with less enthusiasm than the first, although they were really superior.

Gibbon was rather too modestly inclined to agree with the public and "to believe that, especially in the beginning, they were more prolix and less entertaining" than the previous volume.

He also wasted some weeks on his vindication of the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of that volume, which had excited a host of feeble and ill-mannered attacks.