Gibbon | Page 4

Isaiah had
Cambridge equally with Babylon in view when he spoke of the wild
beasts and wild asses, of the satyrs that dance, of an inhabitation of
dragons and a court for owls.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 3: Social Life at the English Universities. By Christopher
Wordsworth. Page 57.]
Into such untoward company was Gibbon thrust by his careless father
at the age of fifteen. That he succumbed to the unwholesome
atmosphere cannot surprise us. He does not conceal, perhaps he rather
exaggerates, in his Memoirs, the depth of his fall. As Bunyan in a state
of grace accused himself of dreadful sins which in all likelihood he
never committed, so it is probable that Gibbon, in his old age, when
study and learning were the only passions he knew, reflected with too
much severity on the boyish freaks of his university life. Moreover
there appears to have been nothing coarse or unworthy in his
dissipation; he was simply idle. He justly lays much of the blame on the
authorities. To say that the discipline was lax would be to pay it an
unmerited compliment. There was no discipline at all. He lived in
Magdalen as he might have lived at the Angel or the Mitre Tavern. He
not only left his college, but he left the university, whenever he liked.
In one winter he made a tour to Bath, another to Buckinghamshire, and
he made four excursions to London, "without once hearing the voice of
admonition, without once feeling the hand of control." Of study he had
just as much and as little as he pleased.
"As soon as my tutor had sounded the insufficiency of his disciple in
school learning, he proposed that we should read every morning from
ten to eleven the comedies of Terence. During the first weeks I
constantly attended these lessons in my tutor's room; but as they
appeared equally devoid of profit and pleasure, I was once tempted to
try the experiment of a formal apology. The apology was accepted with
a smile. I repeated the offence with less ceremony: the excuse was

admitted with the same indulgence; the slightest motive of laziness or
indisposition, the most trifling avocation at home or abroad was
allowed as a worthy impediment, nor did my tutor appear conscious of
my absence or neglect." No wonder he spoke with indignation of such
scandalous neglect. "To the University of Oxford," he says, "I
acknowledge no obligation, and she will as readily 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 most idle and
unprofitable of my whole life. The reader will pronounce between the
school and the scholar." This is only just and fully merited by the
abuses denounced. One appreciates the anguish of the true scholar
mourning over lost time as a miser over lost gold. There was another
side of the question which naturally did not occur to Gibbon, but which
may properly occur to us. Did Gibbon lose as much as he thought in
missing the scholastic drill of the regular public school and university
man? Something he undoubtedly lost: he was never a finished scholar,
up to the standard even of his own day. If he had been, is it certain that
the accomplishment would have been all gain? It may be doubted. At a
later period Gibbon read the classics with the free and eager curiosity
of a thoughtful mind. It was a labour of love, of passionate ardour,
similar to the manly zeal of the great scholars of the Renaissance. This
appetite had not been blunted by enforced toil in a prescribed groove.
How much of that zest for antiquity, of that keen relish for the classic
writers which he afterwards acquired and retained through life, might
have been quenched if he had first made their acquaintance as
school-books? Above all, would he have looked on the ancient world
with such freedom and originality as he afterwards gained, if he had
worn through youth the harness of academical study? These questions
do not suggest an answer, but they may furnish a doubt. Oxford and
Cambridge for nearly a century have been turning out crowds of
thorough-paced scholars of the orthodox pattern. It is odd that the two
greatest historians who have been scholars as well--Gibbon and
Grote--were not university-bred men.
As if to prove by experiment where the fault lay, in "the school or the
scholar," Gibbon had no sooner left Oxford for the long vacation, than
his taste for study returned, and, not content with reading, he attempted

original composition. The subject he selected was a curious one for a
youth in his sixteenth year. It was an attempt to settle the chronology of
the age of Sesostris, and