Note 2-10 — Chapter II
Reading edition
The likeness was afterwards taken up by legend, and the walls of Angoulême, after the battle of Poitiers, are said to have fallen at the sound of the trumpets of Clovis. "A miracle," says Gibbon, "which may be reduced to the supposition that some clerical engineer had secretly undermined the foundations of the rampart." I cannot too often warn my honest readers against the modern habit of "reducing" all history whatever to 'the supposition that'....etc., etc. The legend is of course the natural and easy expression of a metaphor.