rches which have since been
prosecuted with so much success by eminent writers among ourselves,
not to mention similar inquirers on the Continent.

But in the meantime Gibbon had entered on a career which removed him
for long months from books and study. Without sufficiently reflecting
on what such a step involved, he had joined the militia, which was
embodied in the year 1760; and for the next two and a half years led,
as he says, a wandering life of military servitude. At first, indeed,
he was so pleased with his new mode of life that he had serious
thoughts of becoming a professional soldier. But this enthusiasm
speedily wore off, and our "mimic Bellona soon revealed to his eyes
her naked deformity." It was indeed no mere playing at soldiering that
he had undertaken. He was the practical working commander of "an
independent corps of 476 officers and men." "In the absence, or even
in the presence of the two field officers" (one of whom was his
father, the major) "I was intrusted with the effective labour of
dictating the orders and exercising the battalion." And his duty did
not consist in occasional drilling and reviews, but in serious
marches, sometimes of thirty miles in a day, and camping under canvas.
One encampment, on Winchester Downs, lasted four months. Gibbon does
not hesitate to say that the superiority of his grenadiers to the
detachments of the regular army, with which they were often mingled,
was so striking that the most prejudiced regular could not have
hesitated a moment to admit it. But the drilling, and manoeuvring, and
all that pertained to the serious side of militia business interested
Gibbon, and though it took up time it gave him knowledge of a special
kind, of which he quite appreciated the value. He was much struck, for
instance, by the difference between the nominal and effective force of
every regiment he had seen, even when supposed to be complete, and
gravely doubts whether a nominal army of 100,000 men often brings
_fifty_ thousand into the field. What he found unendurable was the
constant shifting of quarters, the utter want of privacy and leisure
it often entailed, and the distasteful society in which he was forced
to live. For eight months at a stretch he never took a book in his
hand. "From the day we marched from Blandford, I had hardly a moment I
could call my own, being almost continually in motion, or if I was
fixed for a day, it was in the guardroom, a barrack, or an inn." Even