_Xenophon_,
to the pompous folios of Gordon's _Tacitus_, and a ragged _Procopius_
of the beginning of the last century." Referring to an accident which
threw the continuation of Echard's _Roman History_ in his way, he
says, "To me the reigns of the successors of Constantine were
absolutely new, and I was immersed in the passage of the Goths over
the Danube, when the summons of the dinner-bell reluctantly dragged me
from my intellectual feast.... I procured the second and third
volumes of Howell's _History of the World_, which exhibit the
Byzantine period on a larger scale. Mahomet and his Saracens soon
fixed my attention, and some instinct of criticism directed me to the
genuine sources. Simon Ockley first opened my eyes, and I was led from
one book to another till I had ranged round the circle of Oriental
history. Before I was sixteen I had exhausted all that could be
learned in English of the Arabs and Persians, the Tartars and Turks,
and the same ardour urged me to guess at the French of D'Herbelot and
to construe the barbarous Latin of Pocock's _Abulfaragius_." Here is
in rough outline a large portion at least of the _Decline and Fall_
already surveyed. The fact shows how deep was the sympathy that Gibbon
had for his subject, and that there was a sort of pre-established
harmony between his mind and the historical period he afterwards
illustrated.

Up to the age of fourteen it seemed that Gibbon, as he says, was
destined to remain through life an illiterate cripple. But as he
approached his sixteenth year, a great change took place in his
constitution, and his diseases, instead of growing with his growth and
strengthening with his strength, wonderfully vanished. This unexpected
recovery was not seized by his father in a rational spirit, as
affording a welcome opportunity of repairing the defects of a hitherto
imperfect education. Instead of using the occasion thus presented of
recovering some of the precious time lost, of laying a sound
foundation of scholarship and learning on which a superstructure at
the university or elsewhere could be ultimately built, he carried the
lad off in an impulse of perplexity and impatience, and entered him as
a gentleman commoner at Magdalen College just before he had completed
his fifteenth year (1752, April 3). This was perhaps the most unwise
step he could have taken under the circumstances. Gibbon was too young
and too ignorant to profit by the advantages offered by Oxford to a