Thus ended the
militia." The compression that his spirit had endured was shown by the
rapid energy with which he sought a change of scene and oblivion of
his woes. Within little more than a month after the scene just
described, Gibbon was in Paris beginning the grand tour.
With that keen sense of the value of time which marked him, Gibbon
with great impartiality cast up and estimated the profit and loss of
his "bloodless campaigns." Both have been alluded to already. He
summed up with great fairness in the entry that he made in his journal
on the evening of the day on which he recovered his liberty. "I am
glad that the militia has been, and glad that it is no more." This
judgment he confirmed thirty years afterwards, when he composed his
Memoirs. "My principal obligation to the militia was the making me an
Englishman and a soldier. After my foreign education, with my reserved
temper, I should long have continued a stranger in my native country,
had I not been shaken in this various scene of new faces and new
friends; had not experience forced me to feel the characters of our
leading men, the state of parties, the forms of office, the operations
of our civil and military system.
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