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at Westminster1 and Cambridge, but never took a degree, | house for Westminster school. Here in the course of two years travelled, became member of parliament, first for Petersfield (1734), then for Southampton (1741), joined the party against Sir Robert Walpole, and (as his son confesses, not much to his father's honour) was animated in so doing by " private revenge against the supposed oppressor" of his family in the South Sea affair. If so, revenge, as usual, was blind; for Walpole had sought rather to moderate than to inflame public feeling against the projectors.

he was invited at Oxford, while the wandering habits by which he had filled it absolutely unfitted him to be a guest. He was not well grounded in any of the elementary branches, which are essential to university studies and to all success in their prosecution. It was natural, therefore, that he should dislike the university, and as natural that the university should dislike him. Many of his complaints of the system were certainly just; but it may be doubted whether any university system would have been profitable to him, considering his antecedents. He complains especially of his tutors, and in one case with abundant reason; but, by his own confession, they might have recriminated with justice, for he indulged in gay society, and kept late hours. His observations, however, on the defects of the English university system, some of which have only very recently been removed, are acute and well worth pondering, however little relevant to his own case. He remained at Magdalen about fourteen months. "To the university of Oxford," he says, "I acknowledge no obligation; and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College; they proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life."

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But thus "idle" though he may have been as a "student," he already meditated authorship. In the first long vacationduring which he, doubtless with some sarcasm, says that "his taste for books began to revive "-he contemplated a treatise on the age of Sesostris, in which (and it was characteristic) his chief | object was to investigate not so much the events as the probable epoch of the reign of that semi-mythical monarch, whom he was inclined to regard as having been contemporary with Solomon. Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book "; but the discovery of his own weakness, he adds, was the first symptom of taste. On his first return to Oxford the work was wisely relinquished," and never afterwards resumed. The most memorable incident, however, in Gibbon's stay at Oxford was his temporary conversion to the doctrines of the church of Rome. The bold criticism of Middleton's recently (1749) published Free Enquiry into the Miraculous Powers which are supposed to have subsisted in the Christian Church appears to have given the first shock to his Protestantism, not indeed by destroying his previous belief that the gift of miraculous powers had continued to subsist in the church during the first four or five centuries of Christianity, but by convincing him that within the same period most of the leading doctrines of popery had been already introduced both in theory and in practice. At this stage he was introduced by a friend (Mr Molesworth) to Bossuet's Variations of Protestantism and Exposition of Catholic Doctrine (see Gibbon, Decline and Fall, c. xv., note 79). "These works," says he, "achieved my conversion, and I surely fell by a noble hand." In bringing about this "fall," however, Parsons the Jesuit appears to have had a considerable share; at least Lord Sheffield has recorded that on the only occasion on which Gibbon talked with him on the subject he imputed the change in his religious views principally to that vigorous writer, who, in his opinion, had urged all the best arguments in favour of Roman Catholicism. But be this as it may, he had no sooner adopted his new creed than he resolved to profess it; "a momentary glow of enthusiasm " had raised him above all temporal considerations, and accordingly, on June 8, 1753, he records that having privately abjured the heresies" of his childhood before a Catholic priest of the name of Baker, a Jesuit, in London, he announced the same to his father in an elaborate controversial epistle which his spiritual adviser much approved, and which he himself afterwards described to Lord Sheffield as having been "written with all the pomp, the dignity, and self-satisfaction of a martyr."

gratulation. It had delivered him for ever from the "port and prejudice " of the university, and led him into the bright paths of philosophic freedom. That his conversion was sincere at the time, that it marked a real if but a transitory phase of genuine religious conviction, we have no reason to doubt, notwithstanding the scepticism he has himself expressed. "To my present feelings it seems incredible that I should ever believe that I believed in transubstantiation," he indeed declares; but his incredulous astonishment is not unmixed with undoubting pride. "I could not blush that my tender mind was entangled in the sophistry which had reduced the acute and manly understandings of a Chillingworth or a Bayle." Nor is the sincerity of the Catholicism he professed in these boyish days in any way discredited by the fact of his subsequent lack of religion. Indeed, as one of the acutest and most sympathetic of his critics has remarked, the deep and settled grudge he has betrayed towards every form of Christian belief, in all the writings of his maturity, may be taken as evidence that he had at one time experienced in his own person at least some of the painful workings of a positive faith.

But little time was lost by the elder Gibbon in the formation of a new plan of education for his son, and in devising some method which if possible might effect the cure of his "spiritual malady." The result of deliberation, aided by the advice and experience of Lord Eliot, was that it was almost immediately decided to fix Gibbon for some years abroad under the roof of M. Pavilliard, a Calvinist minister at Lausanne. In as far as regards the instructor and guide thus selected, a more fortunate choice could scarcely have been made. From the testimony of his pupil, and the still more conclusive evidence of his own correspondence with the father, Pavilliard seems to have been a man of singular good sense, temper and tact. At the outset, indeed, there was one considerable obstacle to the free intercourse of tutor and pupil: M. Pavilliard appears to have known little of English, and young Gibbon knew practically nothing of French. But this difficulty was soon removed by the pupil's diligence; the very exigencies of his situation were of service to him in calling forth all his powers, and he studied the language with such success that at the close of his five years' exile he declares that he "spontaneously thought" in French rather than in English, and that it had become more familiar to "ear, tongue and pen." It is well known that in after years he had doubts whether he should not compose his great work in French; and it is certain that his familiarity with that language, in spite of considerable efforts to counteract its effects, tinged his style to the last.

Under the judicious regulations of his new tutor a methodical course of reading was marked out, and most ardently prosecuted; the pupil's progress was proportionably rapid. With the systematic study of the Latin, and to a slight extent also of the Greek classics, he conjoined that of logic in the prolix system of Crousaz; and he further invigorated his reasoning powers, as well as enlarged his knowledge of metaphysics and jurisprudence, by the perusal of Locke, Grotius and Montesquieu. He also read largely, though somewhat indiscriminately, in French literature, and appears to have been particularly struck with Pascal's Provincial Letters, which he tells us he reperused almost every year of his subsequent life with new pleasure, and which he particularly mentions as having been, along with Bleterie's Life of Julian and Giannone's History of Naples, a book which probably contributed in a special sense to form the historian of the Roman empire. The comprehensive scheme of study included mathematics also, in which he advanced as far as the conic sections in the treatise of L'Hôpital. He assures us that his tutor did not complain of any inaptitude on the pupil's part, and that the pupil was as happily unconscious of any on his own; but here he broke off. He adds, what is not quite The elder Gibbon heard with indignant surprise of this act clear from one who so frankly acknowledges his limited acquaintof juvenile apostasy, and, indiscreetly giving vent to his wrath, ance with the science, that he had reason to congratulate himself precipitated the expulsion of his son from Oxford, a punishment that he knew no more. "As soon," he says, " as I understood which the culprit, in after years at least, found no cause to deplore. the principles, I relinquished for ever the pursuit of the matheIn his Memoirs he speaks of the results of his "childish revolt matics; nor can I lament that I desisted before my mind was against the religion of his country " with undisguised self-hardened by the habit of rigid demonstration, so destructive

of the finer feelings of moral evidence, which must, however, | respects was much in need of such elevation will be doubted determine the action and opinions of our lives."

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Under the new influences which were brought to bear on him, he in less than two years resumed his Protestantism. "He is willing," he says, to allow M. Pavilliard a "handsome share in his reconversion," though he maintains, and no doubt rightly, that it was principally due "to his own solitary reflections." He particularly congratulated himself on having discovered the 'philosophical argument against transubstantiation, "that the text of Scripture which seems to inculcate the real presence is attested only by a single sense-our sight, while the real presence itself is disproved by three of our senses-the sight, the touch, and the taste." Before a similar mode of reasoning, all the other distinctive articles of the Romish creed "disappeared like a dream "; and "after a full conviction," on Christmas day, 1754, he received the sacrament in the church of Lausanne. Although, however, he adds that at this point he suspended his religious inquiries, “acquiescing with implicit belief in the tenets and mysteries which are adopted by the general consent of Catholics and Protestants," his readers will probably do him no great injustice if they assume that even then it was rather to the negations than to the affirmations of Protestantism that he most heartily assented.

by none but the hopelessly cynical; and probably there are few readers who can peruse the paragraph in which Gibbon "approaches the delicate subject of his early love" without discerning in it a pathos much deeper than that of which the writer was himself aware. During the remainder of his residence at Lausanne he had good reason to "indulge his dream of felicity"; but on his return to England, "I soon discovered that my father would not hear of this strange alliance, and that without his consent I was myself destitute and helpless. After a painful struggle I yielded to my fate; I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son; my wound was insensibly healed by time, absence, and the habits of a new life." 2

In 1758 he returned with mingled joy and regret to England, and was kindly received at home. But he found a stepmother there; and this apparition on his father's hearth at first rather appalled him. The cordial and gentle manners of Mrs Gibbon, however, and her unremitting care for his happiness, won him from his first prejudices, and gave her a permanent place in his esteem and affection. He seems to have been much indulged, and to have led a very pleasant life of it; he pleased himself in moderate excursions, frequented the theatre, mingled, though not very often, in society; was sometimes a little extravagant, and sometimes a little dissipated, but never lost the benefits of his Lausanne exile; and easily settled into a sober, discreet, calculating Epicurean philosopher, who sought the summum bonum of man in temperate, regulated and elevated pleasure. The first two years after his return to England he spent principally at his father's country seat at Buriton, in Hampshire, only nine months being given to the metropolis. He has left an amusing acccunt of his employments in the country, where his love of study was at once inflamed by a large and unwonted command of books and checked by the necessary interruptions of his otherwise happy domestic life. After breakfast "he was expected," he says, to spend an hour with Mrs Gibbon; after tea his father claimed his conversation; in the midst of an interesting work he was often called down to entertain idle visitors; and, worst of all, he was periodically compelled to return the well-meant compliments. He mentions that he dreaded the " recurrence of the full moon," which was the period generally selected for the more convenient accomplishment of such formidable excursions.

"the

With all his devotion to study at Lausanne1 (he read ten or twelve hours a day), he still found some time for the acquisition of some of the lighter accomplishments, such as riding, dancing, drawing, and also for mingling in such society as the place had to offer. In September 1755 he writes to his aunt: "I find a great many agreeable people here, see them sometimes, and can say upon the whole, without vanity, that, though I am the Englishman here who spends the least money, I am he who is most generally liked." Thus his "studious and sedentary life" passed pleasantly enough, interrupted only at rare intervals by boyish excursions of a day or a week in the neighbourhood, and by at least one memorable tour of Switzerland, by Basel, Zürich, Lucerne and Bern, made along with Pavilliard in the autumn of 1755. The last eighteen months of this residence abroad saw the infusion of two new elements-one of them at least of considerable importance-into his life. In 1757 Voltaire came to reside at Lausanne; and although he took but little notice of the young Englishman of twenty, who eagerly sought and easily obtained an introduction, the establishment of the theatre at Monrepos, where the brilliant versifier himself de- His father's library, though large in comparison with that he claimed before select audiences his own productions on the stage, commanded at Lausanne, contained, he says, "much trash"; had no small influence in fortifying Gibbon's taste for the but a gradual process of reconstruction transformed it at length French theatre, and in at the same time abating that "idolatry into that "numerous and select " library which was for the gigantic genius of Shakespeare which is inculcated from foundation of his works, and the best comfort of his life both at our infancy as the first duty of an Englishman." In the same home and abroad." 'No sooner had he returned home than he year-apparently about June-he saw for the first time, and began the work of accumulation, and records that, on the forthwith loved, the beautiful, intelligent and accomplished receipt of his first quarter's allowance, a large share was approMademoiselle Susan Curchod, daughter of the pasteur of Crassier.priated to his literary wants. "He could never forget," be That the passion which she inspired in him was tender, pure and fitted to raise to a higher level a nature which in some The Journal for 1755 records that during that year, besides writing and translating a great deal in Latin and French, he had read, amongst other works, Cicero's Epistolae ad familiares, his Brutus, all his Orations, his dialogues De amicitia and De seneciule, Terence (twice), and Pliny's Epistles. In January 1756 he says: "I determined to read over the Latin authors in order, and read this year Virgil, Sallust, Livy, Velleius Paterculus, Valerius Maximus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Quintus Curtius, Justin, Florus, Plautus, Terence and Lucretius. I also read and meditated Locke Upon the Understanding." Again in January 1757 he writes: "I began to study algebra under M. de Traytorrens, went through the elements of algebra and geometry, and the three first books of the Marquis de l'Hôpital's Conic Sections. I also read Tibullus, Catullus, Propertius, Horace (with Dacier's and Torrentius's notes), Virgil, Ovid's Epistles, with Meziriac's commentary, the Ars amandi and the Elegies; likewise the Augustus and Tiberius of Suetonius, and a Latin translation of Dion Cassius from the death of Julius Caesar to the death of Augustus. I also continued my correspondence, begun last year, with M. Allamand of Bex, and the Professor Breitinger of Zürich, and opened a new one with the Professor Gesner of Göttingen. N.B.Last year and this I read St John's Gospel, with part of Xenophon's Cyropacdia, the Iliad, and Herodotus; but, upon the whole, I rather neglected my Greek."

declares, "the joy with which he exchanged a bank note of twenty pounds for the twenty volumes of the Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions," an Academy which has been well characterized (by Sainte-Beuve) as Gibbon's intellectual fatherland. It may not be uninteresting here to note the principles which guided him both now and afterwards in his literary purchases. "I am not conscious," says he, "of having ever bought a book from a motive of ostentation; every volume, before it was deposited on the shelf, was either read or sufficiently examined "; he also mentions that he soon adopted the tolerating maxim of the elder Pliny, that no book is ever so bad as to be absolutely good for nothing.

In London he seems to have seen but little select society partly from his father's taste, "which had always preferred the highest and lowest company," and partly from his own reserve and timidity, increased by his foreign education, which had made English habits unfamiliar, and the very language The affair, however, was not finally broken off till 1763. Mdle Curchod soon afterwards became the wife of Necker, the famous financier; and Gibbon and the Neckers frequently afterwards met on terms of mutual friendship and esteem.

in some degree strange. And thus he was led to draw that Some time before the publication of the essay, Gibbon had interesting picture of the literary recluse among the crowds of entered a new and, one might suppose, a very uncongenial London: "While coaches were rattling through Bond Street, scene of life. In an hour of patriotic ardour he became (June 12, I have passed many a solitary evening in my lodging with my 1759) a captain in the Hampshire militia, and for more than books. My studies were sometimes interrupted with a sigh, two years (May 10, 1760, to December 23, 1762) led a wandering which I breathed towards Lausanne; and on the approach of life of "military servitude." Hampshire, Kent, Wiltshire and spring I withdrew without reluctance from the noisy and Dorsetshire formed the successive theatres of what he calls his extensive scene of crowds without company, and dissipation" bloodless and inglorious campaigns." He complains of the without pleasure." He renewed former acquaintance, however, busy idleness in which his time was spent; but, considering the with the "poet" Mallet, and through him gained access to circumstances, so adverse to study, one is rather surprised that Lady Hervey's circle, where a congenial admiration, not to say the military student should have done so much, than that he affectation, of French manners and literature made him a did so little; and never probably before were so many hours welcome guest. It ought to be added that in each of the twenty- of literary study spent in a tent. In estimating the comparative five years of his subsequent acquaintance with London the advantages and disadvantages of this wearisome period of his prospect gradually brightened," and his social as well as his life, he has summed up with the impartiality of a philosopher intellectual qualities secured him a wide circle of friends. In❘ and the sagacity of a man of the world. Irksome as were his one respect Mallet gave him good counsel in those early days. employments, grievous as was the waste of time, uncongenial He advised him to addict himself to an assiduous study of the as were his companions, solid benefits were to be set off against more idiomatic English writers, such as Swift and Addison- these things; his health became robust, his knowledge of the with a view to unlearn his foreign idiom and recover his half-world was enlarged, he wore off some of his foreign idiom, got forgotten vernacular-a task, however, which he never perfectly accomplished. Much as he admired these writers, Hume and Robertson were still greater favourites, as well from their subject as for their style. Of his admiration of Hume's style, of its nameless grace of simple elegance, he has left us a strong expression, when he tells us that it often compelled him to close the historian's volumes with a mixed sensation of delight and despair.

In 1761 Gibbon, at the age of twenty-four, after many delays, and with many flutterings of hope and fear, gave to the world, in French, his maiden publication, an Essai sur l'étude de la littérature, which he had composed two years before. It was published partly in compliance with his father's wishes, who thought that the proof of some literary talent might introduce him favourably to public notice, and secure the recommendation of his friends for some appointment in connexion with the mission of the English plenipotentiaries to the congress at Augsburg which was at that time in contemplation. But in yielding to paternal authority, Gibbon frankly owns that he "complied, like a pious son, with the wish of his own heart."

rid of much of his reserve; he adds-and perhaps in his estimate it was the benefit to be most prized of all-" the discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the phalanx and the legion, and the captain of the Hampshire grenadiers (the reader may smile) has not been useless to the historian of the Roman empire."

It was during this period that he read Homer and Longinus, having for the first time acquired some real mastery of Greek; and after the publication of the Essai, his mind was full of projects for a new literary effort. The Italian expedition of Charles VIII. of France, the crusade of Richard I., the wars of the barons, the lives and comparisons of Henry V. and the emperor Titus, the history of the Black Prince, the life of Sir Philip Sidney, that of Montrose, and finally that of Sir W. Raleigh, were all of them seriously contemplated and successively rejected. By their number they show how strong was the impulse to literature, and by their character, how determined the bent of his mind in the direction of history; while their variety makes it manifest also that he had then at least no special purpose to serve, no preconceived theory to support, no particular prejudice or belief to overthrow.

The militia was disbanded in 1762, and Gibbon joyfully shook off his bonds; but his literary projects were still to be postponed. Following his own wishes, though with his father's consent, he had early in 1760 projected a Continental tour as the completion "of an English gentleman's education." This had been interrupted by the episode of the militia; now, however, he resumed his purpose, and left England in January 1763. Two years were "loosely defined as the term of his absence," which he exceeded by half a year-returning June 1765. He first visited Paris, where he saw a good deal of d'Alembert, Diderot, Barthélemy, Raynal, Helvétius, Baron d'Holbach and others of that circle, and was often a welcome guest in the saloons of Madame Geoffrin and Madame du Deffand. Voltaire was at Geneva, Rousseau at Montmorency, and Buffon he neglected to visit; but so congenial did he find the society for which his education had so well prepared him, and into which some literary reputation had already preceded him, that he declared, “Had been rich and independent, I should have prolonged and perhaps have fixed my residence at Paris."

The subject of this youthful effort was suggested, its author says, by a refinement of vanity-" the desire of justifying and praising the object of a favourite pursuit," namely, the study of ancient literature. Partly owing to its being written in French, partly to its character, the Essai excited more attention abroad than at home. Gibbon has criticized it with the utmost frankness, not to say severity; but, after every abatement, it is unquestionably a surprising effort for a mind so young, and contains many thoughts which would not have disgraced a thinker or a scholar of much maturer age. His account of its first reception and subsequent fortunes in England deserves to be cited as a curious piece of literary history. "In England," he says, "it was received with cold indifference, little read, and speedily forgotten. A small impression was slowly dispersed; the bookseller murmured, and the author (had his feelings been more exquisite) might have wept over the blunders and baldness of the English translation. The publication of my history fifteen years afterwards revived the memory of my first performance, and the essay was eagerly sought in the shops. But II refused the permission which Becket solicited of reprinting it; the public curiosity was imperfectly satisfied by a pirated copy of the booksellers of Dublin; and when a copy of the original edition has been discovered in a sale, the primitive value of half-a-crown has risen to the fanciful price of a guinea or thirty shillings."

The Essai, in a good English translation, now appears in the Miscellaneous Works. Villemain finds in it " peu de vues, nulle originalité surtout, mais une grande passion littéraire, l'amour des recherches savantes et du beau langage." Sainte-Beuve's criticism is almost identical with Gibbon's own; but though he finds that "la lecture en est assez difficile et parfois obscure, la liaison des idées échappe souvent par trop de concision et par le désir qu'a eu le jeune auteur d'y faire entrer, d'y condenser la plupart de ses notes," he adds, "il y a, chemin faisant, des vues neuves et qui sentent l'historien."

From France he proceeded to Switzerland, and spent nearly a year at Lausanne, where many old friendships and studies were resumed, and new ones begun. His reading was largely designed to enable him fully to profit by the long-contemplated Italian tour which began in April 1764 and lasted somewhat more than a year. He has recorded one or two interesting notes on Turin, Genoa, Florence and other towns at which halt was made on his route; but Rome was the great object of his pilgrimage, and the words in which he has alluded to the feelings with which he

Her letters to Walpole about Gibbon contain some interesting remarks by this" aveugle clairvoyante," as Voltaire calls her; but they belong to a later period (1777).