One testimonial will suffice.

Mr.Freeman says: "That Gibbon should ever be displaced seems impossible.

That wonderful man monopolised, so to speak, the historical genius and the historical learning of a whole generation, and left little, indeed, of either for his contemporaries.
He remains the one historian of the eighteenth century whom modern research has neither set aside nor threatened to set aside.

We may correct and improve from the stores which have been opened since Gibbon's time; we may write again large parts of his story from other and often truer and more wholesome points of view, but the work of Gibbon as a whole, as the encyclopaedic history of 1300 years, as the grandest of historical designs, carried out alike with wonderful power and with wonderful accuracy, must ever keep its place.

Whatever else is read, Gibbon must be read too." Gibbon's immense scheme did not unfold itself to him at once: he passed through at least two distinct stages in the conception of his work.