fondest delight and admiration. Unfortunately, while yet a Child
He was deprived of those Parents. He fell into the power of a
Relation whose only wish about him was never to hear of him
more; For that purpose He gave him in charge to his Friend, the
former Superior of the Capuchins. The Abbot, a very Monk, used
all his endeavours to persuade the Boy that happiness existed
not without the walls of a Convent. He succeeded fully. To
deserve admittance into the order of St. Francis was Ambrosio's
highest ambition. His Instructors carefully repressed those
virtues whose grandeur and disinterestedness were ill-suited to
the Cloister. Instead of universal benevolence, He adopted a
selfish partiality for his own particular establishment: He was
taught to consider compassion for the errors of Others as a crime
of the blackest dye: The noble frankness of his temper was
exchanged for servile humility; and in order to break his natural
spirit, the Monks terrified his young mind by placing before him
all the horrors with which Superstition could furnish them: They
painted to him the torments of the Damned in colours the most
dark, terrible, and fantastic, and threatened him at the
slightest fault with eternal perdition. No wonder that his
imagination constantly dwelling upon these fearful objects should
have rendered his character timid and apprehensive. Add to this,
that his long absence from the great world, and total
unacquaintance with the common dangers of life, made him form of
them an idea far more dismal than the reality. While the Monks
were busied in rooting out his virtues and narrowing his
sentiments, they allowed every vice which had fallen to his
share to arrive at full perfection. He was suffered to be
proud, vain, ambitious, and disdainful: He was jealous of his
Equals, and despised all merit but his own: He was implacable