"It was, of all the books, perhaps the most impressive on me in my then stage of investigation and state of mind. I by no means completely admired Gibbon, perhaps not more than I now do; but his winged sarcasms, so quiet and yet so conclusively transpiercing and killing dead, were often admirable potent and illuminative to me. Nor did I fail to recognise his great power of investigating, ascertaining, grouping, and narrating; though the latter had always, then as now, something of a Drury Lane character, the colours strong but coarse, and set off by lights from the side scenes."