The year I joined the Baha’i Faith, 1959, J.G.A. Pocock(1924-) established and chaired the Department of Political Science at Canterbury New Zealand.  Forty years later, the year I retired from FT work as a teacher, Pocock published the first of a series of volumes on Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.  The first two volumes of Pocock's projected six-volume series on Edward Gibbon, Barbarism and Religion, won the American Philosophical Society's Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History for the year 1999. 

Edward Gibbon had, since my university days been one of my favorite, if not my favorite, historians.  In 2011 my son gave me the first critical edition of the Decline and Fall, in three volumes, by David Womersley. Reading Womersley’s introduction has led to this brief prose-poem.

For commentary on Gibbon's irony and insistence on primary sources, Womersley’s "Introduction" is excellent. While the larger part of Gibbon's caustic view of Christianity is declared within the text of chapters XV and XVI, Gibbon rarely neglects to note its baleful influence throughout the remaining volumes of the Decline and Fall.-Ron Price with thanks to Wikipedia, 21 February 2011.

I’ve been getting back into Gibbon
lately since receiving a delightful
gift from my son and enjoying the
writing of David Womersley.  The
history of the West has been a long
and complex story which I really
only began to get my teeth into in
the 1950s and 1960s. Gibbon was
and is a stylistic triumph and a tour
de force for the mind to play with
if one has a preoccupation and an
appetite for history as a theatre for
human passion, material comfort to
make use of one’s leisure time, and
the desire to consolidate the sense
of identity that comes from learning
and the cultural attainments of mind.1

1 Abdul-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1975(1957), p. 35.

Ron Price
21 February 2011