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.  Earthquakes threatened to topple down our convent towers.  A lurid, baleful light hung in the heavens at night, and showers of ashes, borne by the wind, fell in our narrow valley.  The monks talked of the earth being honey-combed beneath us; of Streams of molten lava raging through its veins; of caverns of sulphurous flames roaring in the centre, the abodes of demons and the damned; of fiery gulfs ready to yawn beneath our feet.  All these tales were told to the doleful accompaniment of the mountain’s thunders, whose low bellowing made the walls of our convent vibrate.