But he had now freedom and no great anxieties, and he began seriously to contemplate the execution of his great work.
Gibbon, as we have seen, looked back with little satisfaction on the five years between his return from his travels and his father's death.
They are also the years during which his biographer is able to follow him with the least certainty.

Hardly any of his letters which refer to that period have been preserved, and he has glided rapidly over it in his Memoirs.

Yet it was, in other respects besides the matter of pecuniary troubles, a momentous epoch in his life.

The peculiar views which he adopted and partly professed on religion must have been formed then.

But the date, the circumstance, and the occasion are left in darkness.