" This is only just and fully merited by the abuses denounced.
One appreciates the anguish of the true scholar mourning over lost
time as a miser over lost gold. There was another side of the question
which naturally did not occur to Gibbon, but which may properly occur
to us. Did Gibbon lose as much as he thought in missing the scholastic
drill of the regular public school and university man? Something he
undoubtedly lost: he was never a finished scholar, up to the standard
even of his own day. If he had been, is it certain that the
accomplishment would have been all gain? It may be doubted. At a later
period Gibbon read the classics with the free and eager curiosity of a
thoughtful mind. It was a labour of love, of passionate ardour,
similar to the manly zeal of the great scholars of the Renaissance.
This appetite had not been blunted by enforced toil in a prescribed
groove. How much of that zest for antiquity, of that keen relish for
the classic writers which he afterwards acquired and retained through
life, might have been quenched if he had first made their acquaintance
as school-books? Above all, would he have looked on the ancient world
with such freedom and originality as he afterwards gained, if he had
worn through youth the harness of academical study? These questions do
not suggest an answer, but they may furnish a doubt.
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