In his account of the dramatic rise of Islam that counterbalanced the Roman empire's long, slow descent into ruin, Edward Gibbon registers the claim of the eighth-century caliph Abdalrahman that he experienced only 14 days of unadulterated happiness in his life. Gibbon found this declaration so remarkable that he wrote one of the most personal of his 8,000 footnotes to The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “If I may speak of myself (the only person of whom I can speak with certainty), my happy hours have far exceeded, and far exceed, the scanty numbers of the caliph of Spain; and I shall not scruple to add, that many of them are due to the pleasing labour of the present composition” (III. 346, n50). Gibbon's assertion of the pleasures of history-writing is itself worth remarking, given his recurrent grim pronouncements on the nature of history. Early on, he characterizes the source materials of his narrative as “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind” (I.102). And in the sixth and final volume, he refers to his project simply as “the history of blood” (III.791). How did Gibbon manage, as he says in the final sentence of his monumental work, to be “amused and exercised near twenty years of my life” (III.1085) with researching, recording, shap¬ing and composing a history so dense with iniquities, catastrophic misjudgments, wanton cruelty and sheer stupidity?

It is perhaps the shaping, more than anything else, that is the key to understanding the pleasure Gibbon took in the epic undertaking of constructing a history that spanned 15 centuries and three continents. “History” is as far removed as possible from what Richardson had in mind when subtitling his novel “the history of a young lady.” Gibbon's act of shaping would need to be strikingly different from Clarissa's microscopic charting of actions and feelings. Nevertheless it may not be surprising that the other great experiment with epic narration in eighteenth-century England should occur in large-scale history-writing. Repeatedly, the authors and many of the critics of the early novel saw it as allied with biography and history rather than with romance and fantasy.