" He thus had been a Catholic for about eighteen months.
Gibbon's residence at Lausanne was a memorable epoch in his life on
two grounds. Firstly, it was during the five years he spent there that
he laid the foundations of that deep and extensive learning by which
he was afterwards distinguished. Secondly, the foreign education he
there received, at the critical period when the youth passes into the
man, gave a permanent bent to his mind, and made him a continental
European rather than an insular Englishman--two highly important
factors in his intellectual growth.
He says that he went up to Oxford with a "stock of erudition which
might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a
schoolboy might have been ashamed." Both erudition and ignorance were
left pretty well undisturbed during his short and ill-starred
university career. At Lausanne he found himself, for the first time,
in possession of the means of successful study, good health, calm,
books, and tuition, up to a certain point: that point did not reach
very far. The good Pavillard, an excellent man, for whom Gibbon ever
entertained a sincere regard, was quite unequal to the task of forming
such a mind.
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