You might have the gout, but you must walk about all the same without making grimaces.

It was a point of good breeding to hide one's sufferings."[2] Similarly Walpole was much offended by a too faithful publication of Madame de Sevigne's _Letters_.

"Heaven forbid," he says, "that I should say that the letters of Madame de Sevigne were bad.

I only meant that they were full of family details and mortal distempers, to which the most immortal of us are subject." But Gibbon was above all things a veracious historian, and fortunately has not refrained from giving us a truthful picture of his childhood.
FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 2: George Sand, quoted in Taine's _Ancien Regime_, p.

181.] Of his studies, or rather his reading--his early and invincible love of reading, which he would not exchange for the treasures of India--he gives us a full account, and we notice at once the interesting fact that a considerable portion of the historical field afterwards occupied by his great work had been already gone over by Gibbon before he was well in his teens.