173794, English historian, author of The History of the Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire. His childhood was sickly, and he
had little formal education but read enormously and
omnivorously. He went at the age of 15 to Oxford, but was forced
to leave because of his conversion to Roman Catholicism. His
father sent him (1753) to Lausanne, where he was formally
reconverted to Protestantism. Actually, he became a skeptic and
later greatly offended the pious by his famous chapters of
historical criticism of Christianity in his great work. In
Lausanne he fell in love with the penniless daughter of a
pastor, Suzanne Curchod (who was later to be the great
intellectual, Mme Necker). The two were engaged to be married,
but Gibbon's father refused consent. Gibbon "sighed as a lover"
"obeyed as a son" and gave up the match. He left Lausanne in
1758. It was on a visit to Rome that he conceived the idea of
his magnificent and panoramic history. This appeared as The
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (6 v