Instead of using the occasion thus presented of recovering some of the precious time lost, of laying a sound foundation of scholarship and learning on which a superstructure at the university or elsewhere could be ultimately built, he carried the lad off in an impulse of perplexity and impatience, and entered him as a gentleman commoner at Magdalen College just before he had completed his fifteenth year (1752, April 3).

This was perhaps the most unwise step he could have taken under the circumstances.

Gibbon was too young and too ignorant to profit by the advantages offered by Oxford to a more mature student, and his status as a gentleman commoner seemed intended to class him among the idle and dissipated who are only expected to waste their money and their time.

A good education is generally considered as reflecting no small credit on its possessor; but in the majority of cases it reflects credit on the wise solicitude of his parents or guardians rather than on himself.

If Gibbon escaped the peril of being an ignorant and frivolous lounger, the merit was his own.
At no period in their history had the English universities sunk to a lower condition as places of education than at the time when Gibbon went up to Oxford.