CHAPTER X.
LAST ILLNESS .-- DEATH .-- CONCLUSION.
Gibbon had now only about six months to live.

He did not seem to have suffered by his rapid journey from Lausanne to London.

During the summer which he spent with his friend Lord Sheffield, he was much as usual; only his friend noticed that his habitual dislike to motion appeared to increase, and he was so incapable of exercise that he was confined to the library and dining-room.

"Then he joined Mr.F.North in pleasant arguments against exercise in general.

He ridiculed the unsettled and restless disposition that summer, the most uncomfortable of all seasons, as he said, generally gives to those who have the use of their limbs." The true disciples of Epicurus are not always the least stout and stoical in the presence of irreparable evils.
After spending three or four months at Sheffield Place, he went to Bath to visit his step-mother, Mrs.Gibbon.His conduct to her through life was highly honourable to him.