I see that today is the anniversary of the birth, in 1737, of Edward Gibbon.

As I believe I mentioned the other day, I have picked up again on my long wade through his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.   And I must say that at times I find Gibbon’s style – very often arch, snarky and superior - to be somewhat tarsome.  Heresy, I know, especially as his writing was admired by authors such as Waugh and Churchill, but there it is: After a while I simply want to slap that smug smile off his face.

Coincidentally, I also happen to have jumped back into my reading of Francis Parkman, currently making my way through his France and England in North America.  (At the moment I’m deep in his description of the hell the French and their Abenaki allies played in southern Maine in the 1690’s trying to throw out the New Englanders.)  Parkman could be every bit as critical of what he saw as institutional and individual vice, folly and shortcoming, and yet his style of presenting such criticism over the course of several thousand pages is much more pallatable to me than Gibbon’s.

This isn’t to say that I’m not going to finish Decline and Fall, because I am.  But I sometimes look on reading it as a chore rayther than a pleasure.  I’ve never had that sensation with Parkman’s works.