Julian recounts what happened to him while he was a poet.

“Rome was now the seat of my nativity, where I was born of a family more remarkable for honor than riches. I was intended for the church, and had a pretty good education; but my father dying while I was young, and leaving me nothing, for he had wasted his whole patrimony, I was forced to enter myself in the order of mendicants.

“When I was at school I had a knack of rhyming, which I unhappily mistook for genius, and indulged to my cost; for my verses drew on me only ridicule, and I was in contempt called the poet.

“This humor pursued me through my life. My first composition after I left school was a panegyric on pope Alexander IV, who then pretended a project of dethroning the king of Sicily. On this subject I composed a poem of about fifteen thousand lines, which with much difficulty I got to be presented to his holiness, of whom I expected great preferment as my reward; but I was cruelly disappointed: for when I had waited a year, without hearing any of the commendations I had flattered myself with receiving, and being now able to contain no longer, I applied to a Jesuit who was my relation, and had the pope’s ear, to know what his holiness’s opinion was of my work: he coldly answered me that he was at that time busied in concerns of too much importance to attend the reading of poems.

“However dissatisfied I might be, and really was, with this reception, and however angry I was with the pope? for whose understanding I entertained an immoderate contempt, I was not yet discouraged from a second attempt. Accordingly, I soon after produced another work, entitled, The Trojan Horse. This was an allegorical work, in which the church was introduced into the world in the same manner as that machine had been into Troy. The priests were the soldiers in its belly, and the heathen superstition the city to be destroyed by them. This poem was written in Latin. I remember some of the lines:—

Mundanos scandit fatalis machina muros,

Farta sacerdotum turmis: exinde per alvum

Visi exire omnes, maguo cum murmure olentes.

Non aliter quam cum llumanis furibundus ab antris

It sonus et nares simul aura invadit hiantes.

Mille scatent et mille alii; trepidare timore

Ethnica gens coepit: falsi per inane volantes

Effugere Dei — Desertaque templa relinquunt.

Jam magnum crepitavit equus, mox orbis et alti

Ingemuere poli: tunc tu pater, ultimus omnium

Maxime Alexander, ventrem maturus equinum

Deseris, heu proles meliori digne parente.”

“I believe Julian, had I not stopped him, would have gone through the whole poem (for, as I observed in most of the characters he related, the affections he had enjoyed while he personated them on earth still made some impression on him); but I begged him to omit the sequel of the poem, and proceed with his history. He then recollected himself, and, smiling at the observation which by intuition he perceived I had made, continued his narration as follows:—

“I confess to you,” says he, “that the delight in repeating our own works is so predominant in a poet, that I find nothing can totally root it out of the soul. Happy would it be for those persons if their hearers could be delighted in the same manner: but alas! hence that ingens solitudo complained of by Horace: for the vanity of mankind is so much greedier and more gen............