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Anybody here actually make it all the way through "Decline and Fall"? I've tried a couple of times but given up each time.
I've read Volume 1 of "Decline and Fall" twice: once when assigned it in college, and afterward on my own from love. I'm eager to make the time to read the other two volumes, as lucky Jason Epstein did. It is hard to overpraise the gorgeous prose, the mordant wit, the sheer intelligence, and the stunning ambition of the work. It is close to unique in English literature.

Did I mention the mordant wit? Someone once described Decline and Fall as "the funniest serious book in English." I would agree. Hypocrites are the favorite target of Gibbon's irony, which is why the book scandalized all of Europe: The ranks of the bishops and other ecclesiastics in early Christianity did not lack for cynical hypocrites, ripe for the mocking as only Gibbon, deadpan, could do. The zingers are often stashed away in the footnotes, something that David Foster Wallace must have noticed.

Not least, the guy pretty much invented modern evidence-based historiography, in which primary sources are weighed and compared. And he followed his reasoning wherever it led him. To me Gibbon represents the best of the Enlightenment.

As a piece of writing it's excellent. Quoting it in the company of (most) contemporary historians is not going to end well, though.
Why?
Because contemporary historiography has moved on and refutes many of Gibbon's propositions. So Decline and Fall is a good read, but also old enough to be a part of history itself.
Examples of contemporary Gibbon discussion:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10xtf2/theor...

That doesn't refute Gibbon's position. At best, it shows opinions to be divided.
Which parts are refuted?
I did via audiobook. It's much easier to passively listen until you find something interesting. There are so many little stories in history. For example, leaders of armies burning their own ships as soon as they make landfall. This forces their soldiers to fight or die. The conquistadors who followed this pattern (sinking instead of burning) their ships did not come up with the idea on their own. They drew from history.
I read Vol. 1 on an audiobook from Audible.com, while out on walks. It was slow going at times because of Gibbon's style, but it was entertaining. One of my favourite lines was:

"...it was an inflexible maxim of Roman discipline, that a good soldier should dread his officers far more than the enemy."

I read the whole thing, in fits and starts. I think it took around five years, though there were some stretches of longer than a year when I didn't read any of it. I think it was a worthwhile exercise, and I'd like to do it again sometime.
> an odd mistake for a historian to make.

[final footnote, wrong temple]

Well, the text also swaps eastern for western when referring to an emperor ...

I don't think I ever read a text so ambiguous about its own declared thesis - the good writing bit - when it makes abundantly clear how much the writer's prejudices flawed the result.

To quote (approximately) from Clive James (essay in Cultural Amnesia) on Gibbon's style "the Grand National, with fences 10 yards apart, each to be jumped forward and backward; and you have to carry your horse."
If one reads the U.S. Declaration of Independence, published in 1776 (the same year as Volume 1 of D&F), it's written in the same Latinate periodic style. That's just how they wrote in the 18th century. Dinging Gibbon for failing to stand outside his historical period is not really fair.

Or try the Federalist Papers, or anything written by the U.S. founding fathers. Same style. Even better, try Fielding's "Tom Jones." Prose as masterly as Gibbon's, but you'll laugh yourself silly at the ribald and bawdy humor, not equaled again until the 20th century. Gotta love the English Enlightenment.

> A married historian, productive in the way Gibbon was, is not so much a joke but perhaps an impossibility. One can be the author of a vast historical work of the kind of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was 20 years in the composing, or be happily married, but one is unlikely to bring off both.

Will Durant was both, in my estimation.

He wrote with his wife, winning a joint Pulitzer, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Durant
You should include both of them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_Durant

And yet, this is the exception that probes the rule. The above quote has an element of humor in it, and it is basically saying "No modern marriage would allow this, as no modern spouse allow themselves to be ignored for so long." But Will and Ariel Durant did not have a modern marriage. Such a marriage is now illegal everywhere. Will Durant would now get 10 years in jail for announcing his feelings.

I'm sorry, I don't follow. What do you mean?
Presumably that Will met, and fell in love with, Ariel when he was 26 or thereabouts and she was a 15-year-old schoolgirl at the school where he taught. So saith Wikipedia, anyway.