with eulogiums and acquiescence, and so as to make you doubt whether the author believed them or not. This is exactly one of the pretences which the young strong mind delights to tear down. It would argue, ‘This writer evidently _means_ that the apostolic miracles have just as much evidence and no more than the popish or the patristic; and how strong’—for Middleton is a master of telling statement—‘he shows that evidence to be! I won’t give up the apostolic miracles, I cannot; yet I must believe what has as much of historical testimony in its favour. It is no _reductio ad absurdum_ that we must go over to the Church of Rome; it is the most diffused of Christian creeds, the oldest of Christian churches.’ And so the logic of the sceptic becomes, as often since, the most efficient instrument of the all-believing and all-determining Church. The consternation of Gibbon’s relatives seems to have been enormous. They cast about what to do. From the experience of Oxford, they perhaps thought that it would be useless to have recourse to the Anglican clergy; this resource had failed. So they took him to Mr. Mallet, a Deist, to see if he could do anything; but he did nothing. Their next step was nearly as extraordinary. They placed him at Lausanne, in the house of M. Pavilliard, a French Protestant minister. After the easy income, complete independence, and unlimited credit of an English undergraduate, he was thrown into a foreign country, deprived, as he says, by ignorance of the language, both of ‘speech and hearing,’—in the position of a schoolboy, with a small allowance of pocket-money, and without the Epicurean comforts on which he already set some value. He laments the ‘indispensable comfort of a servant,’ and the ‘sordid and uncleanly table of Madame Pavilliard.’ In our own day the watchful sagacity of Cardinal Wiseman would hardly allow a promising convert of expectations and talents to remain unsolaced in so pitiful a situation; we should hear soothing offers of flight or succour, some insinuation of a popish domestic and interesting repasts. But a hundred years ago the attention of the Holy See was very little directed to our English youth, and Gibbon was left to endure his position.