Has anyone read Edward Gibbon?

[Tarbicus]

I am rereading it right now. for native English speakers one of the joys of the work is the elegance and precision of Gibbon's language. He was one of the greatest prose stylists of the English language. You can search through the whole, huge work and not find a word out of place or a more succinct, not to say witty, manner of expressing concepts. To his contemporaries, used to a more ornate style, his writings were as astonishing and as influential as Caesar's bare-bones writings were to his contemporaries.

And all done with a quill and a biological spellcheck.