Gibbon | Page 8

a whole year after he had been exposed to the Protestant dialectics
of Pavillard he still, as the latter observed with much regret, continued

to abstain from meat on Fridays. There is something slightly
incongruous in the idea of Gibbon fasting out of religious scruples, but
the fact shows that his religion had obtained no slight hold of him, and
that although he had embraced it quickly, he also accepted with intrepid
frankness all its consequences. His was not an intellect that could
endure half measures and half lights; he did not belong to that class of
persons who do not know their own minds.
However it is not surprising that his religion, placed where he was, was
slowly but steadily undermined. The Swiss clergy, he says, were acute
and learned on the topics of controversy, and Pavillard seems to have
been a good specimen of his class. An adult and able man, in daily
contact with a youth in his own house, urging persistently but with tact
one side of a thesis, could hardly fail in the course of time to carry his
point. But though Gibbon is willing to allow his tutor a handsome share
in the work of his conversion, he maintains that it was chiefly effected
by his own private reflections. And this is eminently probable. What
logic had set up, logic could throw down. He gives us a highly
characteristic example of the reflections in question. "I still remember
my solitary transport at the discovery of a philosophical argument
against the doctrine of 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." He was unaware of the
distinction between the logical understanding and the higher reason,
which has been made since his time to the great comfort of thinkers of
a certain stamp. Having reached so far, his progress was easy and rapid.
"The various articles of the Romish creed disappeared like a dream, and
after a full conviction, on Christmas-day, 1754, I received the
sacrament in the church of Lausanne. It was here 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." He thus had been a Catholic for about eighteen months.
Gibbon's residence at Lausanne was a memorable epoch in his life on
two grounds. Firstly, it was during the five years he spent there that he
laid the foundations of that deep and extensive learning by which he

was afterwards distinguished. Secondly, the foreign education he there
received, at the critical period when the youth passes into the man, gave
a permanent bent to his mind, and made him a continental European
rather than an insular Englishman--two highly important factors in his
intellectual growth.
He says that he went up to Oxford with a "stock of erudition which
might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a
schoolboy might have been ashamed." Both erudition and ignorance
were left pretty well undisturbed during his short and ill-starred
university career. At Lausanne he found himself, for the first time, in
possession of the means of successful study, good health, calm, books,
and tuition, up to a certain point: that point did not reach very far. The
good Pavillard, an excellent man, for whom Gibbon ever entertained a
sincere regard, was quite unequal to the task of forming such a mind.
There is no evidence that he was a ripe or even a fair scholar, and the
plain fact is that Gibbon belongs to the honourable band of self-taught
men. "My tutor," says Gibbon, "had the good sense to discern how far
he could be useful, and when he felt that I advanced beyond his speed
and measure, he wisely left me to my genius." Under that good
guidance he formed an extensive plan of reviewing the Latin classics,
in the four divisions of (1) Historians, (2) Poets, (3) Orators, and (4)
Philosophers, in "chronological series from the days of Plautus and
Sallust to the decline of the language and empire of Rome." In one year
he read over the following authors: Virgil, Sallust, Livy, Velleius
Paterculus, Valerius Maximus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Quintus Curtius,
Justin, Florus, Plautus, Terence, and Lucretius. We may take his word
when he says that this review, however rapid, was neither hasty nor
superficial. Gibbon had the root of all scholarship in him, the most
diligent accuracy and an unlimited faculty of taking pains. But he was a
great scholar, not a minute one, and belonged to the robust race of the
Scaligers and the Bentleys, rather than to the smaller breed of