Simon Ockley first opened my eyes, and I was led from one book to another till I had ranged round the circle of Oriental history.

Before I was sixteen I had exhausted all that could be learned in English of the Arabs and Persians, the Tartars and Turks, and the same ardour urged me to guess at the French of D'Herbelot and to construe the barbarous Latin of Pocock's _Abulfaragius_." Here is in rough outline a large portion at least of the _Decline and Fall_ already surveyed.

The fact shows how deep was the sympathy that Gibbon had for his subject, and that there was a sort of pre-established harmony between his mind and the historical period he afterwards illustrated.
Up to the age of fourteen it seemed that Gibbon, as he says, was destined to remain through life an illiterate cripple.

But as he approached his sixteenth year, a great change took place in his constitution, and his diseases, instead of growing with his growth and strengthening with his strength, wonderfully vanished.

This unexpected recovery was not seized by his father in a rational spirit, as affording a welcome opportunity of repairing the defects of a hitherto imperfect education.