ther. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College. They proved
to be fourteen of the most idle and unprofitable months of my whole life."
This singular experience may be contrasted with that of hundreds, but may
be most fittingly illustrated by stating that of Dr. Lowth, a venerable
contemporary of the historian. He speaks enthusiastically of the place
where the student is able "to breathe the same atmosphere that had been
breathed by Hooker and Chillingworth and Locke; to revel in its grand and
well-ordered libraries; to form part of that academic society where
emulation without envy, ambition without jealousy, contention without
animosity, incited industry and awakened genius."

Gibbon, while still in his boyhood, had read with avidity ancient and
modern history, and had written a juvenile paper on _The Age of
Sesostris_, which was, at least, suggested by Voltaire's _Siecle de Louis
XIV_.

Early interested, too, in the history of Christianity, his studies led him
to become a Roman Catholic; but his belief was by no means stable. Sent by
his father to Lausanne, in Switzerland, to be under the religious training
of a Protestant minister, he changed his opinions, and became again a
Protestant. His convictions, however, were once more shaken, and, at the
last, he became a man of no creed, a sceptic of the school of Voltaire, a
creature of the age of illumination. Many passages of his history display
a sneering unbelief, which moves some persons more powerfully than the
subtlest argument. This modern Platonist, beginning with sensation,
evolves his philosophy from within,--from the finite mind; whereas human
history can only be explained in the light of revelation, which gives to
humanity faith, but which educes all science from the infinite--the mind
of God.

The history written by Gibbon, called _The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire_, begins with that empire in its best days, under Hadrian, and
extends to the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, under Mohammed II.,
in 1453.

And this marvellous scope he has treated with a wonderful equality of
research and power;--the world-absorbing empire, the origin and movements
of the northern tribes and the Scythian marauders, the fall of the Western
Empire, the history of the civil law, the establishment of the Gothic
monarchies, the rise and spread of Mohammedanism, the obscurity of the
middle age deepening into gloom, the crusades, the dawning of letters, and
the inaug