Gibbon left Lausanne and returned to England early in 1758, travelling at some risk in disguise as a Swiss officer in the Dutch army, in order to pass through France at a time of war with England –

He was needed at home; his father had remarried and desired to break the entail, and in good eighteenth-century fashion the son needed to ensure his hopes of the inheritance. Gibbon recognised – at least in recollection – that he needed to leave Lausanne, and separate from Suzanne Curchod, if he was ever to be an Englishman again, and he soon found himself a young country gentleman, dividing his time between the family estate in Buriton, Hampshire – where he worked on the French manuscript of the Essai sur l'etude de la littératuré – and London, where he found English polite culture a little less than congenial. Lady Hervey figures in the Memoirs as the nearest equivalent England had to a salonnière, and there are hints of something less than an affinity with Samuel Johnson's Club which he was to join later. It may also be significant that he tells us of this time that he decided against the profession of the law, partly because black-letter was not his kind of scholarship but also because he lacked the gift of eloquence necessary for success at the bar.