Without preparation or delay, my father carried me to Oxford, and I was matriculated in the university as a gentleman commoner of Magdalen College before I had accomplished the fifteenth year of my age. As often as I was tolerably exempt from danger and pain, reading, free desultory reading, had been the employment and comfort of my solitary hours, and I was allowed, without control or advice, to gratify the wanderings of an unripe taste. My indiscriminate appetite subsided by degrees into the historic line; and I arrived at Oxford with a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed.
The happiness of boyish years I have never known, and that time I have never regretted. To the university of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College, and they proved the fourteen months the most idle and profitless of my whole life. The sum of my improvement there is confined to three or four Latin plays. It might at least be expected that an ecclesiastical school should inculcate the orthodox principles of religion. But our venerable mother had contrived to unite the opposite extremes of bigotry and indifference. The blind activity of idleness urged me to advance without armour into the dangerous mazes of controversy, and at the age of sixteen I bewildered myself in the errors of the church of Rome. Translations of two famous works of Bossuet achieved my conversion, and surely I fell by a noble hand.
No sooner had I settled my new religion than I resolved to profess myself a Catholic, and on June 8, 1753, I solemnly abjured the errors of heresy. An elaborate controversial epistle, addressed to my father, announced and justified the step which I had 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 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.
II.--A Happy Exile
It was necessary for my father to form a new plan of education, and effect the cure of my spiritual malady. After much debate it was determined to fix me for some years at Lausanne, in Switzerland, under the roof and tuition of M. Pavilliard, a Calvinist minister. Suddenly cast on a foreign land, I found myself deprived of the use of speech and hearing, incapable of asking or answering a question in the common intercourse of life. Such was my first introduction to Lausanne, a place where I spent nearly five years with pleasure and profit.
This seclusion from English society was attended with the most solid benefits. Before I was recalled home, French, in which I spontaneously thought, was more familiar than English to my ear, my tongue, and my pen. My awkward timidity was polished and emboldened; M. Pavilliard gently led me from a blind and undistinguishing love of reading into the path of instruction. He was not unmindful that his first task was to reclaim me from the errors of popery, and I am willing to allow him a handsome share of the honour of my conversion, though it was principally effected by my private reflections.
It was now that I regretted the early years which had been wasted in sickness or idleness or mere idle reading, and I determined to supply this defect. My various reading I now digested, according to the precept and model of Mr. Locke, into a large commonplace book--a practice, however, which I do not strenuously recommend. I much question whether the benefits of this laborious method are adequate to the waste of time, and I must agree with Dr. Johnson that what is twice read is commonly better remembered than what is transcribed.
I hesitate from the apprehension of ridicule when I approach the delicate subject of my early love. I need not blush at recollecting the object of my choice, and, though my love was disappointed of success, I am rather proud that I was once capable of feeling such a pure and exalted sentiment. The personal attractions of Mademoiselle Curchod were embellished by the virtues and talents of the mind. Her father lived content with a small salary and laborious duty in the obscure lot of minister of Crassy. In the solitude of a sequestered village he bestowed a liberal, and even learned, education on his only daughter. In her short visit to Lausanne, the wit, the beauty, the erudition of Mademoiselle Curchod were the theme of universal applause. The report of such a prodigy awakened my curiosity; I saw and loved. At Crassy and Lausanne I indulged my dream of felicity, but on my return to England I discovered that my father would not hear of this alliance. After a painful struggle I yielded. I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son; my wound was insensibly healed by time, absence, and the habits of a new life.
III.--To England and Authorship
In the spring of the year 1758 my father signified his permission that I should immediately return home. The whole term of my absence from England was four years ten months and fifteen days. The only person in England whom I was impatient to see was my Aunt Porten, the affectionate guardian of my tender years. It was not without some awe and apprehension that I approached my father; but he received me as a man and a friend. All constraint was banished at our first interview, and afterwards we continued on the same terms of easy and equal politeness.