Page:Studies of a Biographer 1.djvu/176

 with moderate enthusiasm of a man who, considered as a historian, necessarily seemed superficial and inaccurate to his critic. The names thus mentioned are enough to suggest what had really happened. Gibbon had ceased, as he tells us, to be an Englishman. French had become more natural to him than his own language; and his friends held that he had suffered c a serious and irreparable' mischief. Gibbon had, however, become not a Swiss nor a Frenchman, but a cosmopolitan. He had been initiated into the freemasonry of the most enlightened circles of Europe. 'Whatever have been the fruits of his education,' he says, they 'must be ascribed' to his 'fortunate banishment.' Instead of being 'steeped in port and prejudice among the monks of Oxford,' he had breathed a larger air and had become familiar with the thoughts which were shaking the whole intellectual fabric of the time. He could look at history, not from an insular point of view, or in the interests of some narrow set of dogmas, but from the widest philosophical standing-ground of the period. For the present, indeed, history seems to have been rather in the background. He threw himself upon classical literature with an appetite which never failed him in later years.