Further details, which one would like to have, he does not give.

The scene even of the solemn act is not mentioned, nor whether he was baptized again; but this may be taken for granted.
The fact of any one "going over to Rome" is too common an occurrence nowadays to attract notice.

But in the eighteenth century it was a rare and startling phenomenon.

Gibbon's father, who was "neither a bigot nor a philosopher," was shocked and astonished by his "son's strange departure from the religion of his country." He divulged the secret of young Gibbon's conversion, and "the gates of Magdalen College were for ever shut" against the latter's return.

They really needed no shutting at all.