It was a labour of love, of passionate ardour, similar to the manly zeal of the great scholars of the Renaissance.
This appetite had not been blunted by enforced toil in a prescribed groove.

How much of that zest for antiquity, of that keen relish for the classic writers which he afterwards acquired and retained through life, might have been quenched if he had first made their acquaintance as school-books?
Above all, would he have looked on the ancient world with such freedom and originality as he afterwards gained, if he had worn through youth the harness of academical study?
These questions do not suggest an answer, but they may furnish a doubt.

Oxford and Cambridge for nearly a century have been turning out crowds of thorough-paced scholars of the orthodox pattern.

It is odd that the two greatest historians who have been scholars as well--Gibbon and Grote--were not university-bred men.
As if to prove by experiment where the fault lay, in "the school or the scholar," Gibbon had no sooner left Oxford for the long vacation, than his taste for study returned, and, not content with reading, he attempted original composition.

The subject he selected was a curious one for a youth in his sixteenth year.