l, Horace, and Tacitus. He mastered Cicero's Orations and
Letters so that they became ingrained in his mental fiber, and he termed
these and his other works, "a library of eloquence and reason." "As I
read Cicero," he wrote, "I applauded the observation of Quintilian, that
every student may judge of his own proficiency by the satisfaction which
he receives from the Roman orator." And again, "Cicero's epistles may in
particular afford the models of every form of correspondence from the
careless effusions of tenderness and friendship to the well-guarded
declaration of discreet and dignified resentment."[86] Gibbon never
mastered Greek as he did Latin; and Dr. Smith, one of his editors,
points out where he has fallen into three errors from the use of the
French or Latin translation of Procopius instead of consulting the
original.[87] Indeed he himself has disclosed one defect of
self-training. Referring to his youthful residence at Lausanne, he
wrote: "I worked my way through about half the Iliad, and afterwards
interpreted alone a large portion of Xenophon and Herodotus. But my
ardor, destitute of aid and emulation, was gradually cooled and, from
the barren task of searching words in a lexicon, I withdrew to the free
and familiar conversation of Virgil and Tacitus."[88]

All things considered, however, it was an excellent training for a
historian of the Roman Empire. But all except the living knowledge of
French he might have had in his "elegant apartment in Magdalen College"
just as well as in his "ill-contrived and ill-furnished small chamber"
in "an old inconvenient house," situated in a "narrow gloomy street, the
most unfrequented of an unhandsome town";[89] and in Oxford he would
have had the "aid and emulation" of which at Lausanne he sadly felt the
lack.

The Calvinist minister, his tutor, was a more useful guide for Gibbon in
the matter of religion than in his intellectual training. Through his
efforts and Gibbon's "private reflections," Christmas Day, 1754, one
year and a half after his arrival at Lausanne, was witness to his
reconversion, as he then received the sacrament in the Calvinistic
Church. "The articles of the Romish creed," he said, had "disappeared
like a dream"; and he wrote home to his aunt, "I am now a good
Protestant and am extremely glad of it."[90]

An intellectual and social experience of value was his meeting with
Voltaire, who had set up a theater in the neighborhood of Lausanne for
the pe