e risk of being tedious, yet none but minute details
would sufficiently display his patience and subtlety.

It will suffice to relate, that after a sufficient period of preparation
and arrangements being made for maintaining a copious intercourse with
Ludlow, I embarked for Barcelona. A restless curiosity and vigorous
application have distinguished my character in every scene. Here was
spacious field for the exercise of all my energies. I sought out a
preceptor in my new religion. I entered into the hearts of priests and
confessors, the _hidalgo_ and the peasant, the monk and the prelate, the
austere and voluptuous devotee were scrutinized in all their forms.

Man was the chief subject of my study, and the social sphere that
in which I principally moved; but I was not inattentive to inanimate
nature, nor unmindful of the past. If the scope of virtue were to
maintain the body in health, and to furnish its highest enjoyments to
every sense, to increase the number, and accuracy, and order of our
intellectual stores, no virtue was ever more unblemished than mine. If
to act upon our conceptions of right, and to acquit ourselves of all
prejudice and selfishness in the formation of our principles, entitle us
to the testimony of a good conscience, I might justly claim it.

I shall not pretend to ascertain my rank in the moral scale. Your
notions of duty differ widely from mine. If a system of deceit, pursued
merely from the love of truth; if voluptuousness, never gratified at the
expense of health, may incur censure, I am censurable. This, indeed,
was not the limit of my deviations. Deception was often unnecessarily
practised, and my biloquial faculty did not lie unemployed. What has
happened to yourselves may enable you, in some degree, to judge of
the scenes in which my mystical exploits engaged me. In none of them,
indeed, were the effects equally disastrous, and they were, for the most
part, the result of well digested projects.

To recount these would be an endless task. They were designed as mere
specimens of power, to illustrate the influence of superstition: to give
sceptics the consolation of certainty: to annihilate the scruples of a
tender female, or facilitate my access to the bosoms of courtiers and
monks.

The first achievement of this kind took place in the convent of the
Escurial. For some time the hospitality of this brotherhood allowed me
a cell in that magnificent and gloomy fabric. I was drawn hither chi