be better fitted for the office than Gibbon. Descended from a family ancient but not distinguished; while in his memoirs he dwells complacently on its connections and its advantages, still he admits that his ancestors brought him "neither glory nor shame;" and the most remarkable circumstance in the family branches, was a distant relationship to the Chevalier Acton, celebrated in Europe as minister to the king of Naples. His grandfather had acquired wealth by successful mercantile enterprise, in conducting which, as his grandson says, his opinions were subordinate to his interest, for he clothed the troops of King William in Flanders, while he would rather have trafficked with King James, "though not, perhaps," adds the historian," at a cheaper rate." Less disposed than the author of his being and of his fortune to regulate his inclinations by his means, the father of the historian wasted a portion of the property which he had acquired too easily to know its value. He thus bequeathed to his son the necessity of embellishing his existence by success, and of directing towards some important object the activity of a mind, which, in easier circumstances, the quietude of his imagination and the calm of his soul would probably have left without steady and definite employment. From his childhood this activity manifested itself, in the intervals allowed him by feebleness of health and infirmity of body. These annoyed him till his fifteenth year, at which age he became suddenly convalescent; nor did he afterwards suffer from any illness except the gout, and a complaint, at first perhaps accidental, but which too long neglected, at last terminated in death.

Languor is not the natural characteristic of childhood and youth; but when it occurs at that period of life, by checking the sallies of imagination, it facilitates an application to study, more acceptable always to the weak than to the alert. But young Gibbon's illhealth afforded to the indolence of his father and the indulgence of an aunt, who had the care of him, a welcome plea for neglecting his education. All his activity expended itself in the gratification of a love for reading. This employment, dispensing with regular and assiduous study, encourages at once both the indolence and the curiosity of the mind. In young Gibbon a good memory made it the foundation of his future vast attainments. History was his first favourite pursuit, and became his ruling taste. Even thus early he regarded it with that critical and sceptical spirit, which afterwards characterized his manner of considering and writing it. When only fifteen years old, he proposed to undertake a history of the age of Sesostris. It was not his object, as might have been supposed in one so young, to de3cribe the wonderful reign of a conqueror, but to determine the probable date of his existence. His system made Sesostris the contemporary of Solomon. But one difficulty embarrassed him

and his mode of extricating himself from it, ingenious, as he well says, for such a youth, is also curious, inasmuch as it pre-indicates the spirit that was afterwards to preside over the composition of the great work on which his reputation reposes. It is thus stated in his Memoirs : "In his version of the sacred books, Manetho, the high-priest, has identified Sethosis, or Sesostris, with the elder brother of Danaus, who landed in Greece, according to the Parian Marble, 1510 years before Christ. But to my supposition the high-priest is guilty of a voluntary error; flattery is the prolific parent of falsehood. Manetho's history of Egypt is dedicated to Ptolemy Philadelphus, who derived a fabulous or illegitimate pedigree from the Macedonian kings, of the race of Hercules. Danaus is the ancestor of Hercules, and after the failure of the elder branch, his descendants, the Ptolemies, are the sole representatives of the royal family, and may claim by inheritance the kingdom, which they held by conquest." flatterer might hope to court favour, by representing Danaus, the forefather of the Ptolemies, as brother of the Egyptian kings; and where falsehood might so be profitable, Gibbon's suspicions were awakened. He did not, however persevere in his projected work; what he had written was afterwards committed to the flames, and he desisted from his attempts to connect the antiquities of Judea, Greece, and Egypt, "lost," as he says," in a distant cloud." But this fact, which he has recorded in his Memoirs, designates remarkably the future historian of the decline of the Roman empire and establishment of Christianity. We see in it the critic, who, always armed with doubts and probabilities, and detecting in the writers whom he consulted, passions or interests that impugn their testimony, has left nothing scarcely positive or untrenched upon, in the crimes and virtues that he painted.

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So inquisitive a mind, left to its own course of thinking, could not allow any subject, worthy of its attention, to pass unexamined. The same curiosity which inspired a taste for historical controversy, engaged it also in those of a religious character. There is an independence which revolts against the dictation exercised by generally received and prevailing opinions: and this probably it was that decided Gibbon to renounce, for a time, the religion of his country, his family, and his teachers. Proud of the idea that, unassisted, he had discovered truth for himself, he became, at sixteen years of age, a Roman Catholic. Various circumstances prepared his conversion; it was completed by Bossuet's History of the Protestant Variations: "at least," said he, "I fell by a noble hand.". Overcome, for the only time in his life, by an impulse of enthusiasm, the results of which probably inspired him with a distaste for all such movements in future, he abjured Protestantism, before a Catholic priest, on the 8th June, 1753, at the

age of sixteen years, one month, and twelve days, having been born on the 27th April, 1737. This took place secretly, during one of the excursions in which he was permitted to indulge by the lax superintendence exercised over him at Oxford, where he had been entered. Duty prompted him to inform his father of it, who, in the first excitement of anger, made known the fatal secret. The young man was dismissed from Oxford, and soon after separated from his family, who sent him to Lausanne. They hoped that he would there be recalled to the path which he had left, by years of penitence and the instructions of M. Pavilliard, & Protestant minister, under whose care he was placed.

The selected penance was well adapted to produce the desired effect on a character like Gibbon's. His ignorance of the French language, vernacular at Lausanne, condemned him to a wearisome solitude: the dissatisfaction of his father straitened him by a very scanty allowance; the parsimony of Madame Pavilliard, the minister's wife, inflicted on him all the privations of hunger and cold; these disheartening humiliations cooled the generous ardour of intended self-immolation for the cause which he had embraced; and disposed him to seek, with sincerity, convincing reasons for returning to a creed that would exact fewer sacrifices. Arguments, eagerly sought, are soon found. M. Pavilliard took credit to himself for a progress, more assisted by the private reflections of his catechumen, who has recorded his delight at being furnished, by his own reason, with a satisfactory refutation of transubstantiation. This led him, on Christmay-day, 1754, to retract his abjuration, as heartily and sincerely as he had made it eighteen months before. He had then attained the age of seventeen years and a half. Such instabilities, at a more advanced period of life, would have been indications of a frivolous and unreflecting mind; but in him they were only evidences of an excitable imagination, and eager desire for truth. But he had been allowed, too early perhaps, to divest himself of the prejudices which are the safeguard of an age at which principles are not yet founded on reason. "It was here," said Gibbon, recording this event, "that I suspended my religious inquiries, acquiescing with implicit belief in the tenets and mysteries which are adopted by the general consent of Catholics and Protestants." So rapid a conversion from one creed to another, had already, as we see, shaken his confidence in both. His experience of arguments, first assented to with so perfect a conviction of their soundness, and then rejected, necessarily disposed him to question the validity even of those which appeared to him the strongest. The first cause of his scepticism, on all points of religious belief, is perhaps to be found in that religious enthusiasm which broke sway from his early ideas, to embrace a creed in which he had

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not been brought up. Be this, however, as it may, Gibbon seems to have regarded that as one of the most fortunate events of his life; which aroused his family from their negligence, and urged them to exert their authority with a salutary strictness, in order to subject him, somewhat tardily indeed, to a regular course of education and study. M. Pavilliard, a rational and well-informed man, did not restrict his cares to the religious belief of his pupil. He soon acquired a great ascendancy over a docile mind, and availed himself of it for the guidance of that active curiosity which wanted only to be directed to the true fountains of knowledge. But the teacher, competent only to point them out, soon left his pupil to proceed alone on a track where he himself was not strong enough to follow. Here the young man, naturally disposed to be systematic and methodical, brought his studies and reflections into that regular and connected train by which he has so often been led to truth; often, too, would it have prevented his deviations, had he not been sometimes seduced to err by an excessive subtlety and a dangerous readiness to prejudge without study or reflection.

A posthumous volume has been published of his "Extraits raisonnés de mes Lectures." These critical remarks on extracts from the books which he had read, commenced about the time when he entered on the course of study pointed out by M. Pavilliard. In going through them it is impossible not to be struck with the sagacity, accuracy, and acuteness of that calmly reasoning mind, never deviating from the truth which it had marked out for itself. "The use of our reading is to aid us in thinking,' he said in a notice prefixed to these extracts, and from which it appears that he intended them for publication. His reading, in fact, formed only the rough outline of his thoughts; but he kept strictly to that outline. He employed the author's ideas only to produce his own, but his own never wandered from them; he held his onward way firmly and steadily, but always step by step, never by bounding leaps; the train of his reflections never drew him away from the subject where they originated; nor did it excite in him that fermentation of great ideas which study generally produces in strong, overflowing, and capacious minds. Of all that he was able to derive from the work, of which he gave an account, nothing was lost; every thing bore useful fruit; every thing announced the future historian, who would deduce from facts whatever the known offered to his natural sagacity, without attempting to supply or invent the unknown, which could only be the guess-work of imagination.

After his re-conversion, Gibbon found his residence at Lausanne more agrecable than its first aspect augured. The narrow allowance made him by his father, lid not permit him to participate

in the amusements and excesses of his young fellow-countrymen, who displayed through Europe their ideas and habits, to carry back into their own land fashions and grimace. This privation, however, confirmed his taste for study, raised the aspirations of his self-love to a more enduring distinction than any favours of fortune can bestow, and induced him to cultivate a friendly intercourse with the less pretending but more profitable circles of society, in the place of his abode. His easily recognized merit secured a marked welcome; and his love of science introduced him to many learned men, by whose good opinion he attained a consideration which was flattering to him in his youth, and which continued to be the highest gratification of his maturer years.

The calm of his soul was not, however, entirely undisturbed by the agitations of juvenile passion. At Lausanne he saw and loved Mademoiselle Curchod, who afterwards became Madame Necker, and was already celebrated for her attainments and her beauty. His love was that of an honourable young man for a virtuous female. Never probably having experienced, in after years, any return of such emotions, he congratulated himself, with some pride, in his Memoirs, on having been once capable of feeling such a pure and exalted sentiment." The family of Mademoiselle Curchod favoured his addresses. She herself, who was not then in that state of poverty to which the death of her father afterwards reduced her, seems to have received him with pleasure. But young Gibbon, recalled at last to England, after a residence of five years at Lausanne, soon perceived that he could not hope to obtain his father's consent to this alliance. "After a painful struggle," he said, "I yielded to my fate. I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son." This lively antithesis proves that at the time when he wrote his Memoirs he felt little pain from a wound "insensibly healed by time, absence, and the

habits of a new life."* These habits, of a man of fashion in London, less romantic than those of a youthful student among the mountains of Switzerland, found only amusement in the polite attention which he long paid to women. Not one amongst them ever came up to the opinion which he had formed of Mademoiselle Curchod. With her he maintained, through all his future life, a delightful intimacy, such as would follow a tender and honourable attachment, repressed by necessity and reason, without affording, on either side, cause for complaint or resentment. He saw her again, in 1765, at Paris, as the wife of M. Necker,

The manuscript letter still exists, in which Gibbon announced to Mademoiselle Carchod, his father's opposition to their marriage. The first pages are tender and sorrowful, such as an unhappy lover might be expected to indite. Those which follow become gradually calm and reasonable, and conclude thus: "therefore, Mademoiselle, I

ave the honour to be your very humble and most obedient servant, EDWARD GIBBON." He loved Mademoiselle Curchod sincerely; but each one loves according to his character,

and Gibbon's was not prone to love, "though hope be lost."