It was a severe trial which Gibbon had now to undergo. He was by
nature shy and retiring; he was ignorant of French; he was very young;
and with these disadvantages he was thrown among entire strangers
alone. After the excitement and novelty of foreign travel were over,
and he could realise his position, he felt his heart sink within him.
From the luxury and freedom of Oxford he was degraded to the
dependence of a schoolboy. Pavillard managed his expenses, and his
supply of pocket-money was reduced to a small monthly allowance. "I
had exchanged," he says, "my elegant apartment in Magdalen College for
a narrow gloomy street, the most unfrequented in an unhandsome town,
for an old inconvenient house, and for a small chamber ill-contrived
and ill-furnished, which on the approach of winter, instead of a
companionable fire, must be warmed by the dull and invisible heat of a
stove." Under these gloomy auspices he began the most profitable, and
after a time the most pleasant, period of his whole life, one on which
he never ceased to look back with unmingled satisfaction as the
starting-point of his studies and intellectual progress.
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