None of the historians discussed in this book anticipated that Europe, a civilised place of cultural interplay and mutual strategic restraint, could ever again fall prey to universal monarchy. Only Ramsay lived long enough to witness the rise and defeat of Napoleon. To Lord Byron, wandering in the persona of Childe Harold across the war-torn landscape of the continent, history seemed to mock such dreams of a common European civilisation. Travelling along the shores of Lac Leman, he was reminded of two of the locality's most famous inhabitants, one of whom, Voltaire, ‘was fire and fickleness, a child, / Most mutable in wishes, but in mind / A wit as various’, the other, Gibbon, ‘the lord of irony’, sapping ‘a solemn creed with a solemn sneer’. Byron mocks and admires the lonely satiric superiority of their ‘gigantic minds’ to all beneath them, and imaginatively assimilates their vision of the past to the exilic cosmopolitanism of Harold; like Harold, they were Europe's internal exiles, and like Harold, also, standing where Gibbon stood amidst the ruins of Rome, they were ‘orphans of the heart’ repatriating themselves in the bosom of European history.