"A brief parallel," he says, "may save the repetition of a tedious narrative." The result of this expeditious method has been far from happy.

It is the only occasion where Gibbon has failed in his usual high finish and admirable literary form.
Gibbon's style was at one period somewhat of a party question.

Good Christians felt a scruple in discerning any merits in the style of a writer who had treated the martyrs of the early Church with so little ceremony and generosity.

On the other hand, those whose opinions approached more or less to his, expatiated on the splendour and majesty of his diction.

Archbishop Whately went out of his way in a note to his _Logic_ to make a keen thrust at an author whom it was well to depreciate whenever occasion served.