"[2] Similarly Walpole was much offended by a too faithful
publication of Madame de Sevigne's _Letters_. "Heaven forbid," he
says, "that I should say that the letters of Madame de Sevigne were
bad. I only meant that they were full of family details and mortal
distempers, to which the most immortal of us are subject." But Gibbon
was above all things a veracious historian, and fortunately has not
refrained from giving us a truthful picture of his childhood.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 2: George Sand, quoted in Taine's _Ancien Regime_, p. 181.]
Of his studies, or rather his reading--his early and invincible love
of reading, which he would not exchange for the treasures of India--he
gives us a full account, and we notice at once the interesting fact
that a considerable portion of the historical field afterwards
occupied by his great work had been already gone over by Gibbon before
he was well in his teens. "My indiscriminate appetite subsided by
degrees into the historic line, and since philosophy has exploded all
innate ideas and natural propensities, I must ascribe the choice to
the assiduous perusal of the _Universal History_ as the octavo volumes
successively appeared.
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