But there was in my father's mind another sentiment, less creditable to him, than the wish to give me the best education to be had. I mean those soci… - Mark Pattison

About 1500 it seemed as if Europe was about to cast off at one effort the slough of feudal barbarism, and to step at once into the fair inheritance of the wisdom and culture of the ancient world. The Church led the van, and smiled on free inquiry and the new learning. About the third decennium of the century the resistance of the obscurantists was organised, the Catholic reaction set in, and nascent humanism was submerged beneath the rising tide of theological passion and the fatal and fruitless controversies of Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic, to the rival cries of the Bible and the Church. The " sacrificio d'intelletto " of Loyola took the place of the free and rationalising spirit with which Erasmus had looked out upon the world of men.

Another book read this term seized upon my interest in an exceptional way, this was Gibbon's Autobiography. I had long before got hold of a few extracts from this, which had found their way into Lord Sheffield's Memoir of the author, prefixed to an edition of the Decline and Fall which we had at home. Those extracts had fixed themselves in my memory. I now procured the whole book and devoured it, reading it again and again till I could repeat whole paragraphs. Gibbon, in fact, supplied the place of a college tutor; he not only found me advice, but secretly inspired me with the enthusiasm to follow it.

I wanted not merely to get up my classics, but to penetrate to the secrets and mysteries which I vaguely understood to be somehow wrapt up in books, though they had not, as yet, been revealed to me. I was disconcerted to find that none of my new acquaintance had any share of this yearning curiosity.