Free Vintage Reading by Robert Kanigel Page B

plucked from his great reservoir of scholarship only those facts that illuminate his point, relying on the telling detail, not every detail. His is the story of early Western civilization distilled and digested by a clear mind—and a heart alive to history’s victims.
    At one point, while telling how the pure and simple faith of the early Christians ultimately degenerated into worship of saints and relics, Gibbon relates how relics of St. Stephen had been instrumental in the swift conversion of 540 Jews. Of course, he adds, this was achieved “with the help, indeed, of some wholesome severities, such as burning the synagogue, driving the obstinate infidels to starve among the rocks, etc.”
    Gibbon brought to his task vast scholarship, calm reason never twisted by prejudice, and gentle irony. He also brought formidable expository skills. As in his description, for example, of the new city of Constantinople, established by the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century A.D. and capital of the eastern, or Byzantine, branch of the Roman Empire for the next thousand years. Gibbon transports us there, where Europe and Asia meet, to see “the winding channel though which the waters of the Euxine flow with a rapid and incessant course towards the Mediterranean.”
    Modern readers will find Gibbon’s insights into human nature as applicable to today’s news as to the fall of Rome. For example, Gibbon tells how the early church tended to attract sinners of every stripe, while those of more moderate temperament stayed away. Writes he: “Those persons who in the world had followed, though in an imperfect manner, the dictates of benevolence and propriety, derived such a calm satisfaction from the opinion of their own rectitude as rendered them much less susceptible of the sudden emotions of shame, of grief, and of terror, which have given birth to so many wonderful conversions.” To those passing from sin into the welcoming embrace of the church, “the desire of perfection became the ruling passion of their soul; and it is well known that while reason embraces a cold mediocrity, our passions hurry us with rapid violence over the space which lies betweenthe most opposite extremes.”
    By virtue of its length and awesome historical sweep, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire has become a metaphor for all those literary works of weight and substance that one sets aside for a time of future leisure but, presumably, never reads. It is, indeed, substantial; the numerous abridgements available make it more manageable. And yet, so tasty is Gibbon that even, say, a 400-page appetizer is apt to leave one hungry for the whole meal.
    Gibbon elsewhere records that he composed in whole paragraphs, often staying his pen from the page while his thoughts percolated, forming and reforming in his mind. What emerged were elegant sentences promenading up and down the page that leave you wanting more—more of his delicious irony, more of his gentlemanly calm, more of the stately grandeur of his prose.

The Origin of Species
    By Means of Natural Selection,
Or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life
    ____________
    By Charles Darwin
First published in 1859
    When H. L. Mencken went south to Tennessee in 1925 to attend the circus that was the “monkey trial,” it was Charles Darwin up on the stand as much as the schoolteacher John Scopes. Scopes had dared teach evolution, Darwin’s theory that higher forms of life were descended from lower forms, and the whole weight of southern fundamentalism was arrayed against him.
    Today, the trial of Darwin’s ideas continues. His name still crops up often in debates of social policy and scientific theory. Schoolbook controversies in several states have pitted a new, and more sophisticated, crop of “creationist” thinkers against today’s prevailing view that evolution is more than theory, but sure and certain scientific fact.
    And it all began here, with The Origin of Species . Here are