n, he felt his heart sink within him.
From the luxury and freedom of Oxford he was degraded to the
dependence of a schoolboy. Pavillard managed his expenses, and his
supply of pocket-money was reduced to a small monthly allowance. "I
had exchanged," he says, "my elegant apartment in Magdalen College for
a narrow gloomy street, the most unfrequented in an unhandsome town,
for an old inconvenient house, and for a small chamber ill-contrived
and ill-furnished, which on the approach of winter, instead of a
companionable fire, must be warmed by the dull and invisible heat of a
stove." Under these gloomy auspices he began the most profitable, and
after a time the most pleasant, period of his whole life, one on which
he never ceased to look back with unmingled satisfaction as the
starting-point of his studies and intellectual progress.

The first care of his preceptor was to bring about his religious
conversion. Gibbon showed an honourable tenacity to his new faith, and
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 transubs