Excerpt from Historians and Essayists: Edward Gibbon; Thomas Carlyle; Ralph Waldo Emerson; Matthew Arnold; Thomas Babington Macaulay; Washington Irving; William Hickling Prescott His health however gradually improved, and when he entered Magdalen College, Oxford, it might have been expected that a new period Of intellectual development would have begun; but Oxford had at this time sunk to the lowest depth of stagna tion, and to Gibbon it proved extremely uncongenial. He complained that he found no guidance, no stimulus, and no discipline. And that the fourteen months he spent there were the most idle and unprofitable of his life. They were very unexpectedly cut short by his conversion to the Roman Catho lic faith, which he formally adopted at the age of sixteen. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.