1752; and he was still a lad when its gates were shut upon him about a year later, because he had entered the Church of Rome.
How just were his complaints it is hardly necessary here to try to determine. But his complaints were many; and the Men of Magdalen, who are all its lovers, do not care much to speak of Gibbon, to this day. A delicate boy of fifteen or sixteen is hardly the best judge of what is good for himself or for other boys; and Gibbon, in the matter of Magdalen, at least, never grew into his seventeenth year. "To the University of Oxford," he wrote, when he was a good deal of a man in other respects, "To the University of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation, and she will as readily renounce me for a Son as I am willing to disclaim her for a Mother. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College; they proved the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life. The reader," he continued, "will pronounce between the school and the scholar. My college forgot to instruct " [in the matter of his religious education], he said, "I forgot to return [to the Communion-table from which at his entrance he had been-forbidden on account of his youth]. And I was myself forgotten by the first magistrate of the University. Without a single lecture, either public or private, either Christian or Protestant, with-
