taken. My father was neither a bigot nor a philosopher; but his
affection deplored the loss of an only son; and his good sense was
astonished at my strange departure from the religion of my country.
In the first sally of passion he divulged a secret which prudence
might have suppressed, and the gates of Magdalen College were for
ever shut against my return. Many years afterwards, when the name
of Gibbon was become as notorious as that of Middleton, it was
industriously whispered at Oxford, that the historian had formerly
"turned papist;" my character stood exposed to the reproach of
inconstancy; and this invidious topic would have been handled
without mercy by my opponents, could they have separated my cause
from that of the university. For my own part, I am proud of an
honest sacrifice of interest to conscience. I can never blush, if
my tender mind was entangled in the sophistry that seduced the acute
and manly understandings of CHILLINGWORTH and BAYLE, who afterwards
emerged from superstition to scepticism.

While Charles the First governed England, and was himself governed
by a catholic queen, it cannot be denied that the missionaries of
Rome laboured with impunity and success in the court, the country,
and even the universities. One of the sheep,

--Whom the grim wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing said,

is Mr. William Chillingworth, Master of Arts, and Fellow of Trinity
College, Oxford; who, at the ripe age of twenty-eight years, was
persuaded to elope from Oxford, to the English seminary at Douay in
Flanders. Some disputes with Fisher, a subtle jesuit, might first
awaken him from the prejudices of education; but he yielded to his