ed by a nervous
complaint, which, however, disappeared by the time he was 14; a wide
course of desultory reading had, in a measure, repaired the lack of
regular schooling, and when at the age of 15 he was entered at Magdalen
College, Oxford, he possessed, as he himself quaintly puts it, "a stock
of erudition which might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance
of which a schoolboy might have been ashamed"; 14 months later he became
a convert to Roman Catholicism, and in consequence was obliged to quit
Oxford; in the hope of reclaiming him to the Protestant faith he was
placed in the charge of the deistical poet Mallet, and subsequently under
a Calvinist minister at Lausanne; under the latter's kindly suasion he
speedily discarded Catholicism, and during five years' residence
established his learning on a solid foundation; time was also found for
the one love episode of his life--an amour with Suzanne Curchod, an
accomplished young lady, who subsequently became the wife of the French
minister M. Neckar, and mother of Madame de Stael; shortly after his
return to England in 1758 he published in French an Essay on the Study of
Literature, and for some time served in the militia; in 1774, having four
years previously inherited his father's estate, he entered Parliament,
and from 1779 to 1782 was one of the Lords Commissioners of Trade and
Plantations; in 1776 appeared the first volume of his great history "The
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," the conception of which had come
to him in 1764 in Rome whilst "musing amongst the ruins of the Capitol";
in 1787 his great work was finished at Lausanne, where he had resided
since 1783; modern criticism, working with fresh sources of information,
has failed to find any serious flaw in the fabric of this masterpiece in
history, but the cynical attitude adopted towards the Christian religion
has always been regarded as a defect; "a man of endless reading and
research," was Carlyle's verdict after a final perusal of the "Decline,"
"but of a most disagreeable style, and a great want of the highest
faculties of what we would call a classical historian, compared with
Herodotus, for instance, and his perfect clearness and simplicity in
every part"; he, nevertheless, characterised his work to Emerson once as
"a splendid bridge from the old world to the new" (1737-1794).

GIBBONS, GRINLING, a celebrated wood-carver, born at Rotterdam, but
brought up in England; through the influ