Without claiming any precocity of genius, Gibbon describes his mind as having opened considerably in his twelfth year. He had an early and indiscriminate appetite for books, and had indulged it in much desultory reading even before his admission at Oxford. A preference for historical works already displayed itself. His attention was fixed by the accounts of Mahomet and the Saracens; and the ‘Continuation of Echard’s Roman History’ first introduced him to the successors of Constantine. But, as his studies had been directed only by his own curiosity, his information was partial and ill-digested, and more useful as the result of literary habits, than as a fund for the use of his maturer years. Yet even thus early he made an essay at historical composition; and the subject showed that his mind had been chiefly attracted by the records of the Eastern World. The ‘Age of Sesostris,’ suggested perhaps by the ‘Siècle de Louis XIV.,’ then new and popular, was the first production of the pen of Gibbon. But this attempt was presently abandoned; though the unfinished manuscript remained for twenty years at the bottom of a drawer, and was not finally destroyed till 1772. His first publication was an ‘Essai sur l’Etude de la Littérature.’ It appeared in the spring of 1761, and was written in French, through a secret ambition in the author to acquire a peculiar celebrity, as a successful writer in a foreign language. This dream, however, was not realised. The ‘Essai’ was received with little enthusiasm abroad, with absolute indifference at home. Nor, indeed, were its intrinsic merits, clouded as they were by an obscure and abrupt style, sufficient to establish the author’s claims to the reputation which he sought.