"Gibbon's idol Tacitus had been as much moralist as historian. There is a general message in The Decline and Fall, concerned with the worth of freedom and the idealisation of the Roman republic. Furthermore, Gibbon has no doubts about ethical standards of conduct and behaviour, singling out, for instance, the love of pleasure and the love of action as essential components of normal human nature. Some attempts have been made to trace Gibbon's politics specifically through his History, but these have failed to reveal a simple pattern. His instruction has more to do with the principles of human nature and character. If there is any general lesson beyond that, it takes (as L. P. Curtis has observed) the form of a memorial oration to the governing classes on the subject of wisdom, virtue, and power. But Gibbon was too cynical to have had much faith in the effects of instruction, though that did not prevent him from making it part of his historical writing. The experience of past faults, he pointed out, was seldom profitable to the successive generations of mankind."