d serve to precipitate the result. In
any case, this result had been attained some years before the
publication of the first volume of the _Decline and Fall_, in 1776.
Referring to his preparatory studies for the execution of that work,
he says, "As I believed, and as I still believe, that the propagation
of the Gospel and the triumph of the Church are inseparably connected
with the decline of the Roman monarchy, I weighed the causes and
effects of the revolution, and contrasted the narratives and apologies
of the Christians themselves with the glances of candour or enmity
which the pagans have cast on the rising sects. The Jewish and heathen
testimonies, as they are collected and illustrated by Dr. Lardner,
directed without superseding my search of the originals, and in an
ample dissertation on the miraculous darkness of the Passion I
privately drew my conclusions from the silence of an unbelieving age."
Here we have the argument which concludes the sixteenth chapter
distinctly announced. But the previous travail of spirit is not
indicated. Gibbon has marked with precision the stages of his
conversion to Romanism. But the following chapters of the history of
his religious opinions he has not written, or he has suppressed them,
and we can only vaguely guess their outline.

CHAPTER VI.

LIFE IN LONDON.--PARLIAMENT.--THE BOARD OF TRADE.--THE DECLINE AND
FALL.--MIGRATION TO LAUSANNE.

Gibbon's settlement in London as master in his own house did not come
too soon. A few more years of anxiety and dependence, such as he had
passed of late with his father in the country, would probably have
dried up the spring of literary ambition and made him miss his career.
He had no tastes to fit him for a country life. The pursuit of farming
only pleased him in Virgil's _Georgics_. He seems neither to have
liked nor to have needed exercise, and English rural sports had no
charms for him. "I never handled a gun, I seldom mounted a horse, and
my philosophic walks were soon terminated by a shady bench, where I
was long detained by the sedentary amusement of reading or
meditation." He was a born _citadin_. "Never," he writes to his friend
Holroyd, "never pretend to allure me by painting in odious colours the
dust of London. I love the dust, and whenever I move into the Weald it
is to visit you, and not your trees." His ideal was to devote the
morning, commencing early--at seven, say--to study, and the afternoon
and evening to soci