288 GIBBON. 



with London society, the son seems, during the nine 

 months that he passed there of the first two years after 

 his arrival, to have been only intimate with the Mallets 

 and with Lady Harvey, (the present Lord Bristol's grand- 

 mother,) to whom they had introduced him. At Buri- 

 ton, too, he enjoyed the pleasures of a large library; he 

 resumed his classical studies; he read, he abridged and 

 he commented; finally he turned his thoughts towards 

 composition. Mallet advised him to study Swift and 

 Addison ; he studied them and he admired, but he ran 

 counter in every one particular to their example ; and in 

 1761 he published his essay 'Sur 1'Etude de la Littera- 

 ture,' the work of about six weeks nearly two years 

 before, but withheld from the press through dread of its 

 failure. 



Though no one can deny that this work shews both 

 extensive reading and a habit of thinking, and though 

 it is the production unquestionably of a clever man, yet 

 must we admit it to be in some most essential particulars 

 singularly defective, and, in some respects, rather a 

 puerile performance. The cardinal fault is the want of 

 any definite object. Who can tell what the author 

 would be at, if it be not to display his reading, his epi- 

 grammatic talent, and his facility in writing French ? 

 It is said, in the address to the reader, that the author's 

 design was to "vindicate a favourite study, and rescue 

 it from the contempt under which it was languishing." 

 But what is the favourite study? Literature means the 

 whole of learning in one sense ; and, in a more restricted 

 acceptation, it means learning apart from science. But 

 what occasion to vindicate learning 1 Who accused, who 

 contemned it, at least in the middle of the eighteenth 



