it at least greatly enlarged his acquaintance with
English life, and also gave him a knowledge of the rudiments of military
science, which was not without its use to the historian of so many
battles. There was a long journey, lasting for two years and five
months, in France and Italy, which greatly confirmed his foreign
tendencies. In Paris he moved familiarly in some of the best French
literary society; and in Rome, as he tells us in a well-known passage,
while he sat "musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol while the
barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter" (which
is now the Church of the Ara Coeli),--on October 15th, 1764,--he first
conceived the idea of writing the history of the decline and fall of
Rome.

There was also that very curious episode in his life, lasting from 1774
to 1782,--his appearance in the House of Commons. He had declined an
offer of his father's to purchase a seat for him in 1760; and fourteen
years later, when his father was dead, when his own circumstances were
considerably contracted, he received and accepted at the hands of a
family connection the offer of a seat. His Parliamentary career was
entirely undistinguished, and he never even opened his mouth in
debate,--a fact which was not forgotten when very recently another
historian was candidate for a seat in Parliament. In truth, this
somewhat shy and reserved scholar, with his fastidious taste, his
eminently judicial mind, and his highly condensed and elaborate style,
was singularly unfit for the rough work of Parliamentary discussion. No
one can read his books without perceiving that his English was not that
of a debater; and he has candidly admitted that he entered Parliament
without public spirit or serious interest in politics, and that he
valued it chiefly as leading to an office which might restore the
fortune which the extravagance of his father had greatly impaired. His
only real public service was the composition in French of a reply to the
French manifesto which was issued at the beginning of the war of 1778.
He voted steadily and placidly as a Tory, and it is not probable that in
doing so he did any violence to his opinions. Like Hume, he shrank with
an instinctive dislike from all popular agitations, from all turbulence,
passion, exaggeration, and enthusiasm; and a temperate and well-ordered
despotism was evidently his ideal. He showed it in the well-known
passage in which he extols the benevolent despoti