Gibbon returned immediately from Italy to England, and retired to the peaceful retreat of his family and his books. Yet the five years which followed were those on which he reflected with least satisfaction. He was dependent on his father’s generosity, he had no professional occupation for an active and ambitious mind, his very reading was somewhat desultory, and his whole energies were not yet devoted to one great object. He felt the absence of this; and it was ill supplied by his ‘Critical Observations on the 6th Book of the Æneid,’ or his attempt at the History of Switzerland. The death of his father, in 1770, placed him in possession of a moderate fortune and of entire independence; and then it was that he entered in good earnest on the ‘History of the Decline and Fall.’ In 1772 he settled in London, and obtained a seat in parliament for Liskeard. He adhered to the Government of Lord North, and by “many a sincere and silent vote” on the American question, supported the rights (as he says), though not perhaps the interests, of the mother country. As a senator, he acquired no distinction. A mixture of timidity and pride, a want of physical energy and of that ready vigour of mind, which fits men for public life, better than habits of the sagest meditation, disqualified him for political polemics: and even his general opinions seem at that time to have been so little fixed, that when at last he accepted a place at the Board of Trade under Lord North, he gave surprise and offence to the opposition, who considered him as on their side. He fell with his patron; and his natural distaste for politics being probably increased by this and a subsequent disappointment, he retired for ever from the disquietudes of public life. During his residence in London, he published the first three volumes of his History. On the composition of the first he had bestowed peculiar care, and its reception repaid his labours. A very laudatory letter, which he received from Hume, foretold the attacks to which the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters would subject him; for which he was entirely unprepared. And in his subsequent reflections on this subject, he admits that, had he foreseen the offence they were calculated to give, he “might perhaps have softened the two invidious chapters, which would create many enemies, and conciliate few friends.” Among his ecclesiastical opponents, by far the most eloquent and powerful was Bishop Watson, whose high-minded hostility deserved the respect bestowed on it by the historian himself, in his celebrated Vindication.