age of good family,
Inigo de Loyola. Like the romantic Spaniard that he was he had taken, as
he told later, for his lady "no duchess nor countess but one far higher"
and to her he paid court in the genuine spirit of old chivalry. Not that
this prevented him from addressing {399} less disinterested attentions to
other ladies, for, if something of a Don Quixote he was also something of
a Don Juan. Indeed, at the carnival of 1515, his "enormous misdemeanors"
had caused him to be tried before a court of justice and little did his
plea of benefit of clergy avail him, for the judge failed to find a
tonsure on his head "even as large as a seal on a papal bull," and he was
probably punished severely.

Loyola was a Basque, and a soldier to his fingertips. When the French
army invaded Spain he was given command of the fortress of Pampeluna.
Defending it bravely against desperate odds he was wounded [Sidenote: May
23, 1521] in the leg with a cannon ball and forced to yield. The leg was
badly set and the bone knit crooked. With indomitable courage he had it
broken and reset, stretched on racks and the protruding bone sawed off,
but all the torture, in the age before anaesthetics, was in vain. The
young man of about twenty-eight--the exact year of his birth is
unknown--found himself a cripple for life.

To while away the long hours of convalescence he asked for the romances
of chivalry but was unable to get them and read in their place legends of
the saints and a life of Christ by Ludolph of Saxony. His imagination
took fire at the new possibilities of heroism and of fame. "What if you
should be a saint like Dominic or Francis?" he asked himself, "ay, what
if you should even surpass them in sanctity?" His choice was fixed. He
took Madonna for his lady and determined to become a soldier of Christ.

As soon as he was able to move he made a pilgrimage to Seville and
Manresa and there dedicated his arms in a church in imitation of the
knights he had read about in _Amadis of Gaul_. Then, with a general
confession and much fasting and mortification of the flesh, began a
period of doubt and spiritual anguish {400} that has sometimes been
compared with that of Luther. Both were men of strong will and
intellect, both suffered from the sense of sin. But Luther's development
was somewhat quieter and more normal--if, indeed, in the psychology of
conversion so carefully studied by James, the quieter is the more normal.
At any rat