He had excellent health--a strange fact after his sickly childhood; society unbent his mind instead of distracting it; his stomach was perfect--perhaps too good, as about this time he began to be admonished by the gout.

He never seems to have needed change.

"Sufficient for the summer is the evil thereof, viz., one distant country excursion." There was an extraordinary difference in this respect between the present age and those which went before it; restlessness and change of scene have become almost a necessity of life with us, whereas our ancestors could continue healthy and happy for months and years without stirring from home.
What is there to explain the change?
We must not pretend that we work harder than they did.[10] However, Gibbon was able to keep himself in good condition with his long spell of work in the morning, and his dinner-parties at home or elsewhere in the afternoon, and to have kept at home as much as he could.

Whenever he went away to the country, it was on invitations which he could not well refuse.

The result was a leisurely, unhasting fulness of achievement, calm stretches of thorough and contented work, which have left their marks on the _Decline and Fall_.