Edward Gibbon was a member of the English parliament, a historian, and a writer. On May 8, 1737, he was born, and on January 16, 1794, he died. His most important work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, came out in six parts between 1776 and 1788. It is known for the quality and irony of its prose, the way it uses first-hand sources, and the way it criticizes organized religion in a polemical way. After getting sick in 1752, Gibbon went to Bath to get better. When he was 15, his father sent him to Oxford to study as a gentleman commoner at Magdalen College. But he didn't fit in well at college, and he later said that the 14 months he spent there were the "most useless and unprofitable" of his life. He lived in Lausanne for five years and read works by Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, John Locke, Pierre Bayle, and Blaise Pascal. He also traveled around Switzerland to study the constitutions of its cantons.