The reader will pronounce between the school and the scholar." This is only just and fully merited by the abuses denounced.
One appreciates the anguish of the true scholar mourning over lost time as a miser over lost gold.

There was another side of the question which naturally did not occur to Gibbon, but which may properly occur to us.

Did Gibbon lose as much as he thought in missing the scholastic drill of the regular public school and university man?
Something he undoubtedly lost: he was never a finished scholar, up to the standard even of his own day.

If he had been, is it certain that the accomplishment would have been all gain?
It may be doubted.

At a later period Gibbon read the classics with the free and eager curiosity of a thoughtful mind.