The classic tongues crumbled away, and out of their _debris_ arose the modern idioms of France, Italy, and Spain, to which were added in Northern Europe the new forms of Teutonic speech.
The fine and useful arts took a new departure; slavery was mitigated into serfdom; industry and commerce became powers in the world as they had never been before; the narrow municipal polity of the old world was in time succeeded by the broader national institutions based on various forms of representation.

Gunpowder, America, and the art of printing were discovered, and the most civilised portion of mankind passed insensibly into the modern era.
Such was the wide expanse which spread out before Gibbon when he resolved to continue his work from the fall of the Western Empire to the capture of Constantinople.

Indeed his glance took in a still wider field, as he was concerned as much with the decay of Eastern as of Western Rome, and the long-retarded fall of the former demanded large attention to the Oriental populations who assaulted the city and remaining empire of Constantine.

So bold an historic enterprise was never conceived as when, standing on the limit of antiquity in the fifth century, he determined to pursue in rapid but not hasty survey the great lines of events for a thousand years, to follow in detail the really great transactions while discarding the less important, thereby giving prominence and clearness to what is memorable, and reproducing on a small scale the flow of time through the ages.

It is to this portion of Gibbon's work that the happy comparison has been made, that it resembles a magnificent Roman aqueduct spanning over the chasm which separates the ancient from the modern world.