Select Search World Factbook Roget's Int'l Thesaurus Bartlett's Quotations Respectfully Quoted Fowler's King's English Strunk's Style Mencken's Language Cambridge History The King James Bible Oxford Shakespeare Gray's Anatomy Farmer's Cookbook Post's Etiquette Brewer's Phrase & Fable Bulfinch's Mythology Frazer's Golden Bough All Verse Anthologies Dickinson, E. Eliot, T.S. Frost, R. Hopkins, G.M. Keats, J. Lawrence, D.H. Masters, E.L. Sandburg, C. Sassoon, S. Whitman, W. Wordsworth, W. Yeats, W.B. All Nonfiction Harvard Classics American Essays Einstein's Relativity Grant, U.S. Roosevelt, T. Wells's History Presidential Inaugurals All Fiction Shelf of Fiction Ghost Stories Short Stories Shaw, G.B. Stein, G. Stevenson, R.L. Wells, H.G. Reference > Cambridge History > The Age of Johnson > Historians > Essai sur l’Étude de la Littérature   His residence at Lausanne Militia experience   CONTENTS · VOLUME CONTENTS · INDEX OF ALL CHAPTERS · BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21). Volume X. The Age of Johnson. XIII. Historians. § 5. Essai sur l’Étude de la Littérature. Gibbon did not leave Lausanne till April, 1758. During his five years’ sojourn there, his life had been the very reverse of that of a recluse—a character to which, indeed, he never made any pretension. As yet, he had not reached his intellectual manhood; nor is it easy to decide in what degree a steadfast ambition had already taken possession of him. Though his reading was various, it was neither purposeless nor unsystematic. He brought home with him, as the fruit of his studies, a work which was in every sense that of a beginner, but, at the same time, not ill calculated to attract the public. Before sending it to the printer, however, he cheerfully took the experienced advice of Paul Maty, editor of The New Review, and entirely recast it. The very circumstance that Gibbon’s Essai sur l’Étude de la Littérature, published in 1761, was written in French shows under what influences it had been composed and to what kind of readers it was primarily addressed. Its purpose is one more defence of classical literature and history, the study of which was then out of fashion in France; but, though the idea is good, the style lacks naturalness—a defect due to the youthfulness of the writer far more than to the fact of his having written his treatise in a foreign tongue; for he had already acquired a mastery over French which he retained through life.   9 CONTENTS · VOLUME CONTENTS · INDEX OF ALL CHAPTERS · BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD   His residence at Lausanne Militia experience     Shakespeare · Bible · Strunk · Anatomy · Nonfiction · Quotations · Reference · Fiction · Poetry © 1993–2015 Bartleby.com · [Top 150] · Subjects · Titles · Authors · World Lit.