On the death of Edward Gibbon (1737 94), his unpublished papers were left to his friend John Baker Holroyd, first earl of Sheffield, who published them in two volumes in 1796. Volume 2 contains abstracts from Gibbon's reading, with his reflections on what he read, and extracts from his journal (sometimes in French, with a parallel translation), short pieces on various aspects of Roman history, an outline of his planned history of the world from the ninth to the end of the fifteenth century, literary criticism, a history of the House of Brunswick (ancestors of the Hanoverian British royal...