The History of English Poetry favourable response to the first edition. "The Gentleman's Magazine", reviewing the first volume, called it "this capital historical piece", and had no doubt that "every connoisseur will be curious to view the original, and impatient for the completion of it". Of the third volume the same magazine wrote that it "does equal credit to Mr. Warton's taste, judgment, and erudition, and makes us impatiently desirous of more". Edward Gibbon mentioned the "History" in "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", saying it had been accomplished "with the taste of a poet and the minute diligence of an antiquarian". But
Historiography of the fall of the Western Roman Empire catastrophic: Peter Heather, in his "The Fall of the Roman Empire" (2005), maintains the Roman imperial system with its sometimes violent imperial transitions and problematic communications notwithstanding, was in fairly good shape during the first, second, and part of the 3rd centuries AD. According to Heather, the first real indication of trouble was the emergence in Iran of the Sassanid Persian empire (226–651). As reviewed by one writer on Heather's writing, Heather goes on to state—in the tradition of Gibbon and Bury—that it took the Roman Empire about half a century to cope with the Sassanid threat, which it did