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If Gibbon had grown up in England, varying desultory reading at Buriton with port and prejudice at Magdalen and the pleasures of a manly Oxonian among the taverns and bagnios of Covent Garden, his mind would not have ripened so quickly or so evenly, and his boyhood would not have lasted so long. The portrait surviving from those years shows a thoughtful and sensitive face from which the lines of childhood have not quite disappeared. He must have been an attractive boy, red-haired and tiny--helplessly clumsy with hands and feet, but with an excellent bearing and most expressive features. Lausanne in 1757 was the scene of an idyll which Rousseau might have approved: a young scholar from the unknown island, a young beauty from a parsonage in the hills, the summer meeting by the shores of Leman when he was twenty and she eighteen. Gibbon, we may believe, was sincerely, if not very strongly, in love: Suzanne Curchod, we may suspect, wanted to marry someone, and would have preferred him to any of the young clergymen who, with suspicious assiduity, rode out to Crassy every Sunday to help the pastor in the performance of Divine Service. Her parents smiled on their encounters: Gibbon’s behaviour after that unlucky faro party seems to have been irreproachable, and by Swiss standards he was rich.

He has briefly registered the progress of their loves:

1757, June. I saw Mademoiselle Curchod. Omnia vincit amor et nos cedamus amori.

August 1st. I went to Crassy and staid two days.

Oct. 15th. Passed through Crassy.

Nov. 1st. Saw Mdlle. Curchod on my way through Rolle.

Nov. 17th. I went to Crassy and staid there six days.

The family picture completed his enchantment. ‘I saw you attentive to your father’s needs, responsive to your mother’s tenderness, displaying without affectation the virtues which enthralled me. Carried away by love, I swore an attachment beyond the assaults of time. You did not withdraw your eyes and in them I thought I read your tenderness and my happiness. My distraction was observed: they teased me about it: my heart was too full to reply. I pretended business and locked myself in my room.’ That sounds genuine even if we do not believe the story that Gibbon stopped strangers in the lanes round Lausanne with a dagger, and forced them to acknowledge the superior charms of Mlle. Curchod. But there was a strong vein of self-regard in Gibbon’s character, and as the date of his return to England grew nearer he began to prepare her for disappointment. He had nothing but his father’s bounty and his prospects to live on, and he probably realized that marriage with a dowerless foreigner would seem an outrage to his father, and would really be a disaster to himself.

He left Lausanne in the spring of 1758. All Europe was at war, and he had to make his way, in Dutch uniform, in the character of a Swiss officer returning to Holland. On an afternoon in May he presented himself, sound in body and religion, at Kitty’s boarding-house in College Street, and ‘the evening was spent in effusions of joy and confidence’ with his parents. He found his father reconciled, his stepmother a charming and intelligent woman, and both of them anxious to make him happy. But the family fortunes were not flourishing, and in return for an annuity of £300 he was induced to join in cutting off the entail so that his father might mortgage Buriton for £10,000. His grandfather had left the bulk of his disposable property to his daughters. One of them had transmitted her share intact to the Eliots of Port Eliot: the other, Miss Hester, disciple, patroness and almoner of the mystic, William Law, was living a life of seclusion and good works in Northamptonshire. Gibbon always took some pride in the family connection with Law: he seems to have felt that if the Gibbons were to have a spiritual director they showed their judgment by selecting a scholar and a gentleman. To Miss Hester, no doubt at his father’s suggestion, he addressed the first of those inimitable exercises in polite letter-writing which diversify and adorn his correspondence:

Dear Madam,--Tho’ the public voice had long since accustomed me to think myself honoured in calling Mrs. Gibbon my aunt, yet I never enjoyed the happiness of living near her, and of instructing myself not less by her example than by her precepts. Your piety, Madam, has engaged you to prefer a retreat to the world. Errors, justifiable only in their principle, forced my father to give me a foreign education. Fully disabused of the unhappy ideas I had taken up, and at last restored to myself, I am happy in the affection of the tenderest of fathers. May I not hope, Madam, to see my felicity compleat by the acquisition of your esteem and friendship? Duty and Inclination engage me equally to solicit them, all my endeavours shall tend to deserve them, and, with Mrs. Gibbon, I know that to deserve is to obtain. I have now been in England about two months, and should have acquitted myself much sooner of my duty, but frequent journeys to London scarce left me a moment to myself, and since, a very ugly fever my father has had, engrossed all my thoughts. He is now entirely recovered, and desires his love and service to you, Madam, as well as to Mr. Law.--I am, dear Madam, with the sincerest esteem and most profound respect, your most obedient humble servant and dutiful nephew,

E. Gibbon, Junior.

Thoroughly re-established in the confidence of his family, Gibbon cautiously opened the subject of his engagement. As he had expected, his father would not hear of it, and after holding out two hours the lover gave way. Two hours is not much. But Gibbon’s family feelings were strong: he could never forget the agony of grief and despair he had witnessed when his mother died, the darkened room, the tapers burning at midday, and he yielded to his father’s emotions--‘an Englishman, and my son!’ Suzanne fought hard; she suggested as a compromise that he should spend three months every year in Switzerland till his father died. But Mrs. Gibbon, who intercepted her letters, made it clear in the kindest way that there was no hope, and, when her first agitation had subsided, she had sufficient self-control to accept the admiration and encourage the attentions of more likely suitors. Some months later he renewed his plea. But his father’s objections were unshaken. ‘Even if you could afford to marry, Suzanne is a foreigner. You are too fond of foreign ways already--you cannot even speak English properly. She would be uncomfortable in England and she would always be trying to get you back to Switzerland. I could not blame her, but for me it would be misery, for you a crime.’ And by now, after a summer in England, Gibbon must have realized that they were unanswerable.

He was the heir to an English estate, but if he was to take a position in English society he would have to make it first. Socially the Gibbons were betwixt and between; in the country something, in London nothing. In dropping out of London society his father had dropped out of recollection, and there was no one, except David Mallet and his daughter, who had married the Genoese envoy, to give the son a start. He took rooms in Bond Street at a guinea and a half a week, and hoped for the best. He had no friends of his own age: he knew nothing of English ways: a young man from the country could hardly expect to make a good entrance with no better introducers than a pushing journalist and the wife of a minor diplomat. They did their best, but it was not much, though old Lady Hervey was induced to extend a vague patronage. An occasional night out relieved the monotony, but for the most part while the coaches rattled along Bond Street, Gibbon was left alone with his books, reading Hume and Robertson, and sighing for Lausanne.

Buriton, under his stepmother’s management, was a pleasant and always available retreat when funds ran low. A Tudor house with early Georgian additions, where ‘if strangers had nothing to see, the inhabitants had little to desire’; good grounds; fine views of wood and down; handsome horses, sometimes in the coach and sometimes at the plough; a sanguine farming squire with an elegant and careful wife; a library stuffed with old Tory folios, classics, Fathers, and a random collection of modern English books: against such a background we must set, as in a Conversation Piece of the day, the little courtly figure of the son of the house. True, Mrs. Gibbon’s conversation in the morning, Mr. Gibbon’s newspaper in the afternoon, visitors who had to be entertained, visits which had to be returned, and dinners out when the full moon made the heavy Hampshire roads least dangerous, absorbed much precious time. But Gibbon was an early riser--it is one of the surprises in his character--and his library grew as he read. ‘I cannot forget the joy with which I exchanged a bank-note of twenty pounds for twenty volumes of the Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions.’ His Greek studies still languished, but the Gibbons were regular church-goers, and the village congregation may have observed with awe the young squire following the lessons in a Septuagint or a Greek Testament. To the other pursuits of his class he was not drawn. Mrs. Gibbon once made him tramp near five miles after rabbits: it seems to have been his record for physical exertion. A race meeting was just tolerable because it reminded him of the Olympic games: an election furnished instruction in English manners. But he rarely rode and never shot, and his walks usually ended at the nearest seat. He was finishing his first book.

‘The design of my first work, the Essay on the Study of Literature, was suggested by a refinement of vanity, the desire of justifying and praising the object of a favourite pursuit.’ He resented, with a touch of personal pique, the low esteem in which learning was held in the France of Voltaire and Diderot. The philosophers had turned their backs on antiquity: the faithful few were branded with the new-coined name of Erudite: and the current doctrine, which assigned judgment to the philosopher and imagination to the bel esprit, left the scholar with nothing to be proud of but his memory. It was in defence of the Erudite that Gibbon sharpened his first pen. The Essay in itself is no great matter. But by hints and glimpses which he had not yet the skill to combine, it gives us the programme of his intellectual life.

Philosophy, he writes, is the search for first principles: in history, for the principles of movement, the concatenation of cause and effect. Facts are of three orders: those which prove nothing beyond themselves; those which can be used to establish a partial conclusion, to determine a motive or illustrate a character; those which are integral to the general system and move its springs. These are few, but fewer still are the minds which can perceive them and draw them out of ‘the vast chaos of events.’ The historian, like the naturalist, must collect everything and put his system together as the meaning of the particulars becomes clear. The opposition of Philosopher and Erudite is partial: in the true Historian the two are reconciled.