ve
all others should be adored a curious idea of a besotted ignoramus, with
which I got disgusted at the first page, for to my thinking the heart is
no more worthy a part than the lungs, stomach; or any other of the
inwards. The "Mystical City" rather interested me.

I read in it the wild conceptions of a Spanish nun, devout to
superstition, melancholy, shut in by convent walls, and swayed by the
ignorance and bigotry of her confessors. All these grotesque, monstrous,
and fantastic visions of hers were dignified with the name of
revelations. The lover and bosom-friend of the Holy Virgin, she had
received instructions from God Himself to write the life of His divine
mother; the necessary information was furnished her by the Holy Ghost.

This life of Mary began, not with the day of her birth, but with her
immaculate conception in the womb of Anne, her mother. This Sister Mary
of Agrada was the head of a Franciscan convent founded by herself in her
own house. After telling in detail all the deeds of her divine heroine
whilst in her mother's womb, she informs us that at the age of three she
swept and cleansed the house with the assistance of nine hundred
servants, all of whom were angels whom God had placed at her disposal,
under the command of Michael, who came and went between God and herself
to conduct their mutual correspondence.

What strikes the judicious reader of the book is the evident belief of
the more than fanatical writer that nothing is due to her invention;
everything is told in good faith and with full belief. The work contains
the dreams of a visionary, who, without vanity but inebriated with the
idea of God, thinks to reveal only the inspirations of the Divine Spirit.

The book was published with the permission of the very holy and very
horrible Inquisition. I could not recover from my astonishment! Far from
its stirring up in my breast a holy and simple zeal of religion, it
inclined me to treat all the mystical dogmas of the Faith as fabulous.

Such works may have dangerous results; for example, a more susceptible
reader than myself, or one more inclined to believe in the marvellous,
runs the risk of becoming as great a visionary as the poor nun herself.

The need of doing something made me spend a week over this masterpiece of
madness, the product of a hyper-exalted brain. I took care to say nothing
to the gaoler about this fine work, but I began to feel the effects of
reading it. As soon as I went