yron so truly says, he speedily amassed a
store of learning which has seldom been equaled. His insatiable love of
knowledge, his rare capacity for concentrated, accurate, and fruitful
study, guided by a singularly sure and masculine judgment, soon made
him, in the true sense of the word, one of the best scholars of his
time. His learning, however, was not altogether of the kind that may be
found in a great university professor. Though the classical languages
became familiar to him, he never acquired or greatly valued the minute
and finished scholarship which is the boast of the chief English
schools; and careful students have observed that in following Greek
books he must have very largely used the Latin translations. Perhaps in
his capacity of historian this deficiency was rather an advantage than
the reverse. It saved him from the exaggerated value of classical form,
and from the neglect of the more corrupt literatures, to which English
scholars have been often prone. Gibbon always valued books mainly for
what they contained, and he had early learned the lesson which all good
historians should learn: that some of his most valuable materials will
be found in literatures that have no artistic merit; in writers who,
without theory and almost without criticism, simply relate the facts
which they have seen, and express in unsophisticated language the
beliefs and impressions of their time.

Lausanne and not Oxford was the real birthplace of his intellect, and he
returned from it almost a foreigner. French had become as familiar to
him as his own tongue; and his first book, a somewhat superficial essay
on the study of literature, was published in the French language. The
noble contemporary French literature filled him with delight, and he
found on the borders of the Lake of Geneva a highly cultivated society
to which he was soon introduced, and which probably gave him more real
pleasure than any in which he afterwards moved. With Voltaire himself he
had some slight acquaintance, and he at one time looked on him with
profound admiration; though fuller knowledge made him sensible of the
flaws in that splendid intellect. I am here concerned with the life of
Gibbon only in as far as it discloses the influences that contributed to
his master work, and among these influences the foreign element holds a
prominent place. There was little in Gibbon that was distinctively
English; his mind was essentially cosmopolitan. His tastes, idea