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His favourite way of doing this is to make a false statement in the text and then to qualify it in the footnote in such words that the learned cannot quarrel with him, while the unlearned are thoroughly deceived. He tells you in the text that the thing was so certainly, when he very well knows that it was not, and that if there is a scrap of evidence for it, that evidence is bad. Then he puts in a footnote, a qualification of what he has just said in the text, so that the critic who really knows the subject has to admit that Gibbon knew it too. As though I should write "The Russians marched through England in 1914," and then put a footnote, "But see the later criticisms of this story in the accurate and fanatical Jones." At other times Gibbon bamboozles the ordinary reader by a reference which looks learned and is inane; so that your plain man says, "Well, I cannot look up all these old books, but this great man has evidently done so."

A first-rate example of both these tricks combined in Gibbon is the famous falsehood he propagated about poor St. George, of whom, Heaven be witness, little enoughssss1 is known without having false stories foisted upon him. You will find it in his twenty-third chapter, where he puts forward the absurd statement that St. George was identical with George of Cappadocia, the corrupt and disgraceful bacon-contractor and the opponent of St. Athanasius.