It was, of all the books, perhaps the most impressive on me in my then stage of investigation and state of mind. I by no means completely admired Gibbon, perhaps not more than I now do; but his winged sarcasms, so quiet and yet so conclusively transpiercing and killing dead, were often admirable potent and illuminative to me. Nor did I fail to recognise his great power of investigating, ascertaining, grouping, and narrating; though the latter had always, then as now, something of a Drury Lane character, the colours strong but coarse, and set off by lights from the side scenes.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "It was, of all the books, perhaps the most impressive on me in my then stage of investigation and state of mind. I by no means completely admired Gibbon, perhaps not more than I now do; but his winged sarcasms, so quiet and yet so conclusively transpiercing and killing dead, were often admirable potent and illuminative to me. Nor did I fail to recognise his great power of investigating, ascertaining, grouping, and narrating; though the latter had always, then as now, something of a Drury Lane character, the colours strong but coarse, and set off by lights from the side scenes." in the context of "Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences, Vol. I, ed. James Anthony Froude (1881), p. 102" to mean that wisdom is timeless.