Oxford and
Cambridge for nearly a century have been turning out crowds of
thorough-paced scholars of the orthodox pattern. It is odd that the
two greatest historians who have been scholars as well--Gibbon and
Grote--were not university-bred men.
As if to prove by experiment where the fault lay, in "the school or
the scholar," Gibbon had no sooner left Oxford for the long vacation,
than his taste for study returned, and, not content with reading, he
attempted original composition. The subject he selected was a curious
one for a youth in his sixteenth year. It was an attempt to settle the
chronology of the age of Sesostris, and shows how soon the austere
side of history had attracted his attention. "In my childish balance,"
he says, "I presumed to weigh the systems of Scaliger and Petavius, of
Marsham and of Newton; and my sleep has been disturbed by the
difficulty of reconciling the Septuagint with the Hebrew computation."
Of course his essay had the usual value of such juvenile productions;
that is, none at all, except as an indication of early bias to serious
study of history. On his return to Oxford, the age of Sesostris was
wisely relinquished.
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