FROM
Edward Gibbon was born near London in 1737 and was sent to Switzerland after a temporary conversion to Catholicism at Oxford. He became a temporary captain in the South Hampshire militia during World War II and in 1774 entered Parliament as a supporter of Lord North. Meanwhile he had begun writing The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, completed in 1787. He died in 1794.
During the Seven Years' War, with fears of an invasion, Gibbon was called to militia service.
The loss of so many busy and idle hours was not compensated by any elegant pleasures and my temper was insensibly soured by the society of our rustic officers who were alike deficient in the knowledge of scholars and the manners of gentlemen.
In every state there exists, however, a balance of good and evil. The habits of a scholarly life were usefully broken by the duties of an active profession: in the healthful exercise of the field I hunted with a battalion instead of a pack, and that time I was ready, at any hour of the day or night, to fly from quarters to London, from London to quarters, on the slightest call of private or regimental business. But my principal obligation to the militia was the making me an Englishman and a soldier. After my foreign education, with my reserved temper I should long have continued a stranger to my native country, had I not been shaken in this various scene of new faces and new friends; had not experience forced me to feel the character of our leading men, the state of parties, the forms of office, and the operation of our civil and military system.
In this peaceful service I imbibed the rudiments of the language and science of tactics, which opened a new field of observation and study. I diligently read and meditated the Memoires Militaires of Quintis Icilius (Mr. Guichardt), the only writer who has united the merits of a professor and a veteran. The discipline and evolution of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the Phalanx and the Legions, and the Captain of the Hampshire grenadiers (the reader may smile) has not been useless to the historian of the Roman Empire.