Oh no! Gibbon is mad at him! The Pocket University 20 August 2023
Remember Edward Gibbon from yesterday? Well, this English writer lavished praise on him, then got on his bad side. See it all unfold in just three letters!
Emails will never be as cool as letters. And I’ve written some nice emails and seen some. But it won’t be the same as a woman or man taking a writing implement and scratching thoughts at handwriting speed onto a paper, with thinking and writing at equal speed, and the mail it off to last into perpetuity.
So, for your enjoyment, Horace Walpole (famous for the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otronto), waxes gloriously on reading Edward Gibbon’s first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, talking it up to a colleague, then explaining how he said the wrong thing and pissed off Gibbon.1
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