Edward Gibbon, the English historian and man of letters, was born at Putney, Surrey, of a well-to-do family. Frail and constantly ill, the child owed the preservation of his life to an aunt, Miss Catherine Porten, who also acted as his teacher. After instruction by a series of tutors and much reading on his own, he entered Magdalen College, Oxford, at the age of fifteen, with, as he later confessed, "a stock of erudition which might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed." Fourteen months at college, "the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life," ended with self-conversion to Roman Catholicism. His irate father immediately packed him off to Lausanne, Switzerland, under the care of Daniel Pavillard, a Calvinist minister who soon led him back to Protestantism. Thereafter, he developed a decidedly skeptical...