"Shortly after my book was in print, I began to reread Gibbon, ... and after I started it occurred to me to count the errors that his expert editor, J. B. Bury, recorded in the footnotes. I do not mean misstatements due to later research, but Gibbon's errors in using his own sources – wrong names, taking a town for a man, saying the opposite of what the cited source plainly says. I found 20 such in volume 1, forty in vol. 2, 20 again in 3, at which halfway point I stopped. And the curious thing is that the text with these blemishes is of Gibbon's own revised edition. But even so, there is nothing like Gibbon, Burckhardt, and others whose work is or was thus pockmarked."

— Jacques Barzun