or how little of all this
touched Gibbon, we do not know. We do know one thing, that his English
clothes were unfashionable and looked very foreign, the French being
"excessively long-waisted." Doubtless his scanty purse could not
afford a new outfit, such as Walpole two years afterwards, under the
direction of Lady Hertford, promptly procured. On the 8th of May he
hurried off to Lausanne.[5]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 5: The chronicle of events which occurred during Gibbon's
sojourn in Paris will be found in the interesting _Memoires de
Bachaumont._]

His ultimate object was Italy. But he wisely resolved to place a
period of solid study between the lively dissipation of Paris and his
classic pilgrimage. He knew the difference between seeing things he
had read about and reading about things after he had seen them; how
the mind, charged with associations of famous scenes, is delicately
susceptible of impressions, and how rapidly old musings take form and
colour, when, stirred by outward realities; and contrariwise, how slow
and inadequate is the effort to reverse this process, and to clothe
with memories, monuments and sites over which the spirit has not sent
a halo of previous meditation. So he settled down quietly at Lausanne
for the space of nearly a year, and commenced a most austere and
systematic course of reading on the antiquities of Italy. The list of
learned works which he perused "with his pen in his hand" is
formidable, and fills a quarto page. But he went further than this,
and compiled an elaborate treatise on the nations, provinces, and
towns of ancient Italy (which we still have) digested in alphabetical
order, in which every Latin author, from Plautus to Rutilius, is laid
under contribution for illustrative passages, which are all copied out
in full. This laborious work was evidently Gibbon's own guidebook in
his Italian travels, and one sees not only what an admirable
preparation it was for the object in view, but what a promise it
contained of that scrupulous thoroughness which was to be his mark as
an historian. His mind was indeed rapidly maturing, and becoming
conscious in what direction its strength lay.

His account of his first impressions of Rome has been often quoted,
and deserves to be so again. "My temper is not very susceptible of
enthusiasm, and the enthusiasm which I do not feel I have ever scorned
to affect. But at the distance of twenty-five years I can neither
forget nor express the s