I've read Volume 1 of "Decline and Fall" twice: once when assigned it in college, and afterward on my own from love. I'm eager to make the time to read the othe

I've read Volume 1 of "Decline and Fall" twice: once when assigned it in college, and afterward on my own from love. I'm eager to make the time to read the other two volumes, as lucky Jason Epstein did. It is hard to overpraise the gorgeous prose, the mordant wit, the sheer intelligence, and the stunning ambition of the work. It is close to unique in English literature. Did I mention the mordant wit? Someone once described Decline and Fall as "the funniest serious book in English." I would agree. Hypocrites are the favorite target of Gibbon's irony, which is why the book scandalized all of Europe: The ranks of the bishops and other ecclesiastics in early Christianity did not lack for cynical hypocrites, ripe for the mocking as only Gibbon, deadpan, could do. The zingers are often stashed away in the footnotes, something that David Foster Wallace must have noticed. Not least, the guy pretty much invented modern evidence-based historiography, in which primary sources are weighed and compared. And he followed his reasoning wherever it led him. To me Gibbon represents the best of the Enlightenment.