Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/592

Rh 574 G I B T artars and Turks, he forthwith plunged i11to t.he French of l)'Herbelot, and the Latin of l’oeock's version of .~bulf-aragius, sometimes understanding them, but oftener only guessing their n1eaning. He soon learned to call to his aid the subsidiary sciences of geography and chronology, aml before he was quite capable of reading them had already attempted to weigh in his childish balance the competing systems of Scaliger and Petavius, of Marsham and Newton. At this early period l1e seems already to have adopted in some degree the plan of study lie followed i11 after life, and recommended in his Essai su-r l’1i't m.le—tl1-at is, of letting his subject rather than his author determine his course, of suspending the perusal of a book to reﬂect, and to compare the statements with those of other authors,——so tl1at he often read portions of many volmnes while niastering one. Towards his sixteenth year he tells us “nature dis- played in his favour her myst.erious energies,” and all his infirmitics suddenly vanished. Thenceforward, while never possessing or abusing the insolence of health, he could say “few persons l1avc been more exempt from real or imaginary ills.” His unexpected recovery revived his father's hopes for his education, hitherto so much neglected if judged by ordinary standards ; and accordingly in Janu- ary 1752 he was placed at Esher, Surrey, under the care of Dr Francis, the well known translator of Horace. But Cibbon’s friends in a few weeks discovered that the new tutor preferred the pleasures of London t.o the instruction of his pupils, and in this perplexity decided to send him prematurely to Oxford, where he was matriculat.ed as a gentlem m commoner of lfagdalen College, 3d April, 1752. .ceording to his ow11 testimony, he arrived at the university “ with a stock of information which might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a scl1ool—boy might be ashamed.” And indeed l1is huge wallet of scraps stood him in little stead at the trim banquets to which 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 uni- versity 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 reeriminated with justice, for he indulged i11 gay society, and kept late hours. His observations, h=)wever, on the defects of the English univer- sity system, some of which have only very recently been removed, are acute and well worth pandering, 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 unpro- ﬁtable of my whole life.” But thus “ idle ” though he may have been as a “stu- dent,” he already meditaterl authorship. In the ﬁrst long vacation—during which he, doubtless with some sarcasm, says that “his taste for books began to revive ”—he con- templated a treatise on the age of Sesostris, in which (and it was characteristic) his chief object was to investi- gate 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. “ l'nprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskille-l in the arts of composition, I l-EON 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 relinquislled,” and never afterwards resumed. The most memomble inci- dent, however, in Gibbons stay at Oxford was his tem- porary conversion to the doctrines of the church of llome. The bold critic,isn1 of Middleton's recently (1749) published Free 1:'1zqu1')'_2/into I/ze J/iraculous Powers 20/u'c/1 are set/:}2o.s<<'d to have subsisletl in I/u’ (I/u'[s(/"an C/um-/L_. appears to have given the ﬁrst shock t.o 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 con- vincing 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 Molcsworth) to Bossuefs l'ariations of Protestantism, and _E.rpos1't£on of ('c(t/mlic Doctrine (see Gibbon, Dcclilze 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 con- siderable share ; at least Lord Shcﬁield 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 Iloman Catholi- cism. 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 con- siderations, and accordingly, 011 J1n1e 8, 1753, he records that having “ privately abjurcd the hcresies ” of his child- hood 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." The elder Gibbon heard with indignant surprise of this act of juvenile apostasy, and, indiscreetly giving vent to his wrath, precipitated the expulsion of his son from Oxford, a punishment which the culprit, in after years at least, found no cause to deplore. In his Jlcnzoi-rs he speaks of the results of his “ childish revolt against the religion of his country” with undisguised .self—gro.tulation. It had de- livered 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 t.o doubt, notwith- standing 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 de- clares; but his incredulous astonishment is not umnixcd 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 experi- enced 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 forma- tion of a new plan of education for his son, and in devising some method which if possible might effect the cure of his 1 “spiritual malady.” The result of deliberation, aided by the