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The Essay had been begun at Lausanne, and was therefore written in French, with a florid dedication to Suzanne, which was afterwards suppressed. It was finished in February 1759. But it was not published till 1761, and one of the first copies was presented under canvas to the Duke of York. One does not easily picture the young author, belted and sworded, drilling the yokels of South Hampshire or roystering with their officers in Portsmouth taverns. Yet this was the life to which fate had consigned him. The Seven Years’ War was in progress, the militia had been embodied, and Major Gibbon the elder, and Captain Gibbon the younger, had to take the field in the summer of 1760. Otherwise he would probably have gone back to Switzerland, and his life and Suzanne’s might have run a different course.

For two whole years and more the militia marched and countermarched along the downs, from Winchester to Blandford, pleasant and hospitable, to Devizes, populous and disorderly, to Dover, where they exercised in sight of the Gallic shores. The Captain enjoyed his duties more than his society: for seven months, while he was learning his drill, he was cut off from books, and against his cautious judgment that in reviews the South Hampshires were rather a credit than a disgrace to the line, must be set his confession that his military fever was cooled by the enjoyment of a mimic Bellona. But he was a keen and active officer: he brought to his military duties the professional thoroughness that he applied to everything except his finances and his correspondence. ‘The militia,’ he avers, ‘made me an Englishman and a soldier,’ and he purrs with pride over those unfortunate scholars who were so far from understanding the discipline of a legion that they had never, perhaps, even seen a battalion under arms. Wherever the South Hants Grenadiers marched--their motto Falces conflantur in Enses was Gibbon’s selection--a small classical library travelled in the baggage: Blandford was the scene of his first grand attack on the difficulties of the Greek tongue, and the Journal is almost evenly divided between field days, court martials, drinking bouts, the Iliad and Les Racines Grecques.

March 31st. The Battalion was out this morning with officers and 12 rounds. I exercised them. As it blew a storm of wind the whole time, I went directly to the firings, which considering the weather they performed very well. I tryed for the first time firing them in the single column. In the evenings I read the Enquiry, p. 56-80, went thro’ Racines Greques, 12-16; and reviewed the first three hundred lines of the fifth book of the Iliad. Wallis of the Dorset dined and supped with us.

April 5th. This morning was terribly broke into by the adjournment of our Court Martial which lasted 8 to 10, and a field day which I attended eleven to one. However, as the greatest difficulties are those occasioned by our own laziness I found means to go through the Racines Greques from 28-32, to review the whole VIth book of the Iliad, and to read the VIIth v. 1-123 in this busy day.

May 7th. We had a very good field day with officers. I never saw the Battalion do anything better than marching in battalion slow time down the hill, and halting to fire by subdivisions every ten or twelve paces. We tryed a new thing of my invention; firing six deep. When you are marching in battalion, the four centre subdivisions advance out, the two upon each flank incline inwards and form in their rear, the Grenadiers dress upon the right and left with the front subdivisions. On the preparative the Grenadiers make ready; when they fire, the two right-hand subdivisions make ready; that is to say, the rear subdivisions make ready three ranks standing, and the front subdivision comes down, the three ranks as front rank. The moment the rear has fired, the front subdivision (except the front rank) rises. The two left-hand subdivisions make ready in the same manner when the second subdivision of Grenadiers fires. In a word, each of the four front and rear subdivisions makes ready when the front subdivision upon their right or left fires. The order of firing is, the Grenadiers, the rear subdivisions on the flanks, the front subdivisions on the flanks, rear subdivisions in the centre, front subdivisions in the centre. The battalion is formed again in the same manner as from the single column. I read to-day the XIth Book of the Iliad, v. 542-847 the end. In the evening Williams and Thresher came over from Dorchester to sup with us.

May 8th. . . . This was my birthday, on which I entered into the 26th year of my age. This gave me occasion to look a little into myself, and consider impartially my good and bad qualities. It appeared to me, upon this enquiry, that my Character was virtuous, incapable of a base action, and formed for generous ones; but that it was proud, violent, and disagreeable in society. These qualities I must endeavour to cultivate, extirpate, or restrain, according to their different tendency. Wit I have none. My imagination is rather strong than pleasing. My memory both capacious and retentive. The shining qualities of my understanding are extensiveness and penetration; but I want both quickness and exactness. As to my situation in life, tho’ I may sometimes repine at it, it perhaps is the best adapted to my character. I can command all the conveniences of life, and I can command too that independence (that first earthly blessing), which is hardly to be met with in a higher or lower fortune. When I talk of my situation, I must exclude that temporary one, of being in the Militia. Tho’ I go thro’ it with spirit and application, it is both unfit for, and unworthy of me.

June 12th. I reviewed the XVth Book of the Iliad. Miss Page and Miss Fanny Page dined with us, the eldest is that dangerous female character called a wit. Fanny is quite the reverse, a pretty, meek (but I am afraid) insipid Girl. She has been talked of for me, but tho’ she will have a noble fortune, I must have a wife I can speak to.

13th. I read the XVIth Book of the Iliad, v. 1-113.

July 19th. I sacrificed the morning rather thro’ curiosity than any other motive to Miss Fanny’s company. As she is under no constraint there, she is very chearfull and chatty, but discovers little understanding and less improvement. The education of both the sisters was totally neglected. All that the eldest is she owes it entirely to her own natural genius. She (I mean the eldest) in company with Miss Farrel and young Batten came in to dine with us. Batten is a proof how well an ordinary genius may go through the world. Without either parts, knowledge or address, his good nature, good humour, great spirits, and acquaintance with country affairs make him acceptable to every family round the country. Miss Farrel is a good pretty girl.

July 20th. Fanny was sent for home early in the morning to meet some company who were expected at Watergate; but I fancy it was to avoid the Millers. They all (Sir John and Lady Miller, Mrs. M. and the two Miss Millers) came to dine with us by invitation. Mrs. Gibbon gave them a most excellent dinner of eleven and eleven with a desert. We are to dine with them Saturday.

July 21st. A Violent headache.

Of more consequence than his acquirements as a soldier was the shaking, as he calls it, which dissipated his reserve and removed the traces of his foreign education. He got to know, and even to like, his father, who appeared to his best advantage, a cultivated country gentleman, among rustic Tories who were only by large allowance gentlemen and by no reckoning cultivated men. ‘I was much pleased with him,’ he afterwards told his friends. He cannot have enjoyed those rough nights with his fellow-officers, except when Colonel Wilkes of the Bucks Militia dined in mess, bubbling over with wit and mischief and plans for turning Lord Bute inside out. But he endured them and they hardened him. Perhaps they over-hardened him. It was in the course of his military service that he sustained the injury which, neglected, was to shorten his life. A young man with Gibbon’s physical disadvantages put in authority over lusty young squireens may have overdone it in more ways than one: even Tom Jones had his awkward moments in a militia mess.

On the return of peace in 1763, his future was still to consider. He had been nominated for Petersfield in 1761, and declined the poll in a spirited little speech. The family income, though steadily declining under his father’s optimistic management, was just sufficient to secure him a seat. But he refused a prospect to which he felt himself unequal, and asked that the money might be spent on a foreign tour. Thirty-six days after the disbandment of the militia he was in Paris, with liberty to go where else he liked and a fund of £1200 for extraordinaries. At first he was delighted. The Ambassador indeed neglected him, and Mallet’s introductions were received with a smile. But Lady Hervey sent him to Madame Geoffrin, mère des philosophes, and there he met Helvétius, who showed him great attention and passed him on to Baron d’Holbach. ‘I do assure you,’ he writes to his stepmother, ‘that in a fortnight passed at Paris I have heard more conversation worth remembering, and seen more men of letters among the people of fashion, than I had done in two or three winters in London.’ But a certain dissatisfaction soon makes itself felt. Gibbon had not made up his mind whether he wished to be received as a gentleman or a man of letters, and he was not quite sure of himself on either footing. His book helped him to fix his position. ‘Il décida de mon Etat. J’étais homme de lettres reconnu et ce n’est qu’à Paris que cette qualité forme un Etat.’ But not even French politeness could take the Essai very seriously: and Paris no doubt was well aware that, though he left his name at proper intervals at the Duke of Bedford’s door, he was not admitted. He was never comfortable in large societies, and he found the artists and writers better company, ‘less vain and more reasonable,’ by themselves in the morning than when they united their brilliancy at the tables of the great. Before his fourteen weeks were up, he had begun to withdraw from the splendours of society to the homelier entertainment furnished by Madame Bontemps: ‘a very good sort of a woman,’ he assures his stepmother, ‘agreeable and sans prétensions. She seems to have conceived a real motherly attachment for me (Gibbon already knew her son, a young diplomat in London). I generally sup there three or four times a week quite in a friendly way.’ This is not quite how he confided the story to his Journal.

Elle m’aimait, j’étais son fils et son ami. Mes sentiments répondaient aux siens. J’ai peu vu des femmes aussi aimables que celle-là. Son cœur sentait vivement et avec délicatesse jusqu’aux moindres impressions. Elle est bonne, franche, et douce. Elle commença d’abord à s’attacher à moi: me parlait de ses affaires les plus secrettes et me donnait des conseils et jusqu’à des réprimandes. Elle avait même quelquefois des Ouvertures que je ne comprends pas trop encore. Elle me parlait des plaisirs des sens, m’encourageait à en parler, m’entendait lire les contes de la Fontaine, et lorsque échauffé par ces agaceries je m’émancipois un peu, elle me repoussait faiblement et paraissait émue. Avec un peu plus de hardiesse j’aurais peut être réussi. Peut être aussi cette conduite n’était l’effet que de la liberté françoise et de la franchise d’un caractère qui agissait sans façon parce qu’il agissait sans dessein.

Madame Bontemps completed his education. But even the ‘exquisite blessing’ of her friendship and instructions could not conceal the fact that Paris was very expensive, and that the round of calls, dinners, galleries, churches and libraries, in the style befitting an Englishman of condition, were making a hole in that fund for extraordinaries. To economize for the descent on Italy he retired to Lausanne. With this departure his real life begins.