d in his
senatorial robes, rustling with pomp and pride. The magnificence of his
person had daunted my strong imagination. I could never approach him
with the confiding affection of a child.

My father's feelings were wrapped up in my elder brother. He was to be
the inheritor of the family title and the family dignity, and every
thing was sacrificed to him--I, as well as every thing else. It was
determined to devote me to the church, that so my humors and myself
might be removed out of the way, either of tasking my father's time and
trouble, or interfering with the interests of my brother. At an early
age, therefore, before my mind had dawned upon the world and its
delights, or known any thing of it beyond the precincts of my father's
palace, I was sent to a convent, the superior of which was my uncle,
and was confided entirely to his care.

My uncle was a man totally estranged from the world; he had never
relished, for he had never tasted its pleasures; and he deemed rigid
self-denial as the great basis of Christian virtue. He considered every
one's temperament like his own; or at least he made them conform to it.
His character and habits had an influence over the fraternity of which
he was superior. A more gloomy, saturnine set of beings were never
assembled together. The convent, too, was calculated to awaken sad and
solitary thoughts. It was situated in a gloomy gorge of those mountains
away south of Vesuvius. All distant views were shut out by sterile
volcanic heights. A mountain stream raved beneath its walls, and eagles
screamed about its turrets.

I had been sent to this place at so tender an age as soon to lose all
Distinct recollection of the scenes I had left behind. As my mind
expanded, therefore, it formed its idea of the world from the convent
and its vicinity, and a dreary world it appeared to me. An early tinge
of melancholy was thus infused into my character; and the dismal
stories of the monks, about devils and evil spirits, with which they
affrighted my young imagination, gave me a tendency to superstition,
which I could never effectually shake off. They took the same delight
to work upon my ardent feelings that had been so mischievously
exercised by my father's household.

I can recollect the horrors with which they fed my heated fancy during
an eruption of Vesuvius. We were distant from that volcano, with
mountains between us; but its convulsive throes shook the solid
foundations of nature. Ear