often let his mind fix for hours together on pictures which fed his vanity, but brought him when they faded only boredom and dejection. How different the result, the strange enduring joy and peace that came to him when he dealt on the great heroic figures of St. Francis and St. Dominic.

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It is not difficult to understand why St. Francis immediately attracted him. He had been familiar with the Franciscan tertiary nuns of his own valley since childhood. They owed their foundation to a member of his family, and another member, on his mother's side, María de Guevara, had established the Poor Clares in Arévalo. The influence of the Franciscan poet Montesino was strong in the household of Don Juan Velázquez in which Inigo had passed his most impressionable years, and his later patron, the Duke of Nájera, is known also to have been much addicted to the Friars Observant. In any case, such a passage as the following from the life of St. Francis in the Flos Sanctorum would have been bound to give the invalid a salutary shock: He was a merchant up to his twentieth year and he spent that period living in vanity. But God chastised him with infirmity, and changed him from that hour into another man.'1 Had Inigo known the Latin classics, he might well have exclaimed, de te fabula narratur! The life of worldly vanity, the sickness almost unto death, the transformation, it was an alarming parallel which issued in the naïvely competitive sentiment,' How would it be if I should do what St. Francis did?' Little did he guess at the moment how far he would have to go and by what a terrible road before he could do what St. Francis and St. Dominic did, in the spirit of Francis and Dominic. However, by the grace of God he was started. He had made his first little essay in spiritual discernment, of which he was to become such a supreme master, but God, treating him as the child he was in things of the soul, let him keep his illusions on account of his good will. God can draw straight with crooked lines.

1 The passage is from a later edition of the Flos Sanctorum, with Vagad's prologues, than that which Inigo read. Textually, however, it is the same book, now very rare. A copy is treasured at Loyola, of which Father Leturia made a thorough study. The last few pages of the present book are heavily indebted to his masterpiece, El Gentilhombre Iñigo López de Loyola, pp. 151-64.

As will appear from Inigo's later practice, some of it very extravagant though always generously intended, he did not confine his reading to the lives of St. Francis and St. Dominic, but roamed through the book until some odd or even grotesque woodcut appealed to his fancy. One saint in particular appears to have fascinated him, the Egyptian hermit Onuphrius or Humphrey who, according to his legend, had lived for seventy years utterly alone in the desert, clothed, except for a girdle of foliage, only in his own hair which fell right down to the ground. Abbot Paphnutius was so alarmed when he came upon him during one of his peregrinations of the desert that, thinking him to be some new kind of wild beast, he took to his heels, but was called back by the gentle old man. They spent the night in prayer together, and in the morning St. Humphrey died, whereupon the cave, his dwelling, crumbled, and the date palm, his only source of food, faded away. The story of him was brought to Europe by the returning Crusaders, and made an immense appeal to medieval men, especially in Spain, France and England, where Humphrey in various forms became a popular Christian name.1

Inigo began his journey to God by trying to copy what he had read in his books exactly as a worshipping little boy copies the gait, the habit of speech, even the oddities, of his father or some idol of the playing-fields. The mature Saint spoke as follows of his former groping self:

Having gained no little light from that reading he began to think more earnestly about his past life and how greatly he needed to do penance for it. And here there came to his mind again the desire to imitate the saints,

1 The legend is given in full in the Acta Sanctorum, volume III of June, under the twelfth of that month, St. Humphrey's feast-day, and also in Migne, P. L., 73, pp. 213 sqq. Pedro Leturia shows by detailed analysis the many ways in which the legend affected Inigo de Loyola, in an article contributed to the fine Spanish periodical, Manresa (Vol. II, 1926, pp. 224–238). Ignatius himself does not give Humphrey's name but Jerónimo Nadal mentions him as one of the three saints who principally influenced the experimenting hero of Pamplona.

worrying nothing at all except to promise himself that, with the grace of God, he would do as they had done. But the sum of his longing was to make, as soon as he should be well again, that pilgrimage to Jerusalem of which there was mention earlier, with as many disciplines and fasts as a generous heart, fired with the love of God, would habitually wish to practise. So with these holy desires which he entertained he gradually began to forget his past fantasies, and he was strengthened in his course by a visitation in the following manner. Lying awake one night, he saw clearly an image of our Lady with the Holy Child Jesus, from which sight he drew for a considerable time very great consolation. It left him with such a loathing for the whole of his past life, especially for his carnal indulgences, that he seemed to be delivered there and then from all the sinful imagery formerly in his mind. From that hour until August, 1553, when this is written, he never again gave the very least consent to a carnal temptation. From that effect it could be concluded that the vision was from God, though he would not dare to decide nor say more than that the facts related happened. At all events, his brother and the whole household noticed from his external conduct the change that had taken place interiorly in his soul. Without allowing anything to trouble his peace, he went on with his reading and persevered in his good resolutions. When he spoke with any of the family, the conversation was entirely about the things of God, thus profiting their souls. Taking so much pleasure as he did in those books, it occurred to him to transcribe briefly some of the more essential events in the Lives of our Lord and of the Saints. So he set himself very diligently to write a book,1 for he had by that time begun to get up and move about the house a little. He put the words of Christ in red ink and those of our Lady in blue. The paper was glazed and ruled, and the letters were well formed because he was a very good penman. Part of his time he devoted to this writing and part to prayer. And the greatest consolation

1In the margin: It counted about three hundred quarto pages, all of them written on."

which he received was from watching the heavens and the stars, which he did very often and for a long time, because when so engaged he felt in himself a great heart to serve our Lord,1

Divine grace, working on and through his naturally generous spirit, had taken Inigo a long way in a short time. At first, he desired to do the heroic things which St. Francis and St. Dominic had done out of sheer admiration for their courage. A delight in difficult exploits for their own sake was part of his temperament, and sanctity no less than chivalry provided a wide field for their performance. But from the point where he first reasoned about the things of God, a subtle change came over him, almost without his realizing it. He began to think more earnestly about his past life and the great necessity he lay under to do penance for it.' Here was a completely supernatural motive for imitating the heroic austerities of the Saints, which the supernatural intervention of our Lady and her Divine Child confirmed by cleansing the mind of the impure images that had defiled it. Amadis is not quite finished with yet, but when he appears again it will be to inspire Inigo with an act of heroic and touching devotion. The star-gazing which he mentions became with him a life-long addiction, as it has been of many great and thoughtful men. The commodious, tall decorum of that sky' of his valley which he was able to watch from his couch in its autumn and winter livery, and the pre-Copernican stars at night, no less impressive because he had none of our wonderful knowledge about them, affected him as they had affected the Psalmist two thousand years carlier: When I consider Thy heavens . . . what is man that Thou art mindful of him?' His chivalry, never to be lost, had turned heavenward. In the prologues written by the

1 MHSJ, Fontes narrativi de S. Ignatio de Loyola, I, pp. 374-6. Inigo's book of excerpts in red and blue, which would have been such a precious possession for those who loved and love him, must have been lost at an early date, as none of his first companions appears to have seen it, though they knew its size and length. The words of our Lord were printed in red in the Alcalá folios which he used, but the idea of putting our Lady's words from the Gospels in blue ink was his own, a sign of his devotion to her.

good converted caballero Vagad for his edition of the Golden Legend, Inigo may well have thrilled to see the Saints described as 'caballeros de Dios', and in a harmony of the Gospel-accounts of the Passion of our Lord which the devout Cistercian prefixed to the various lives, the other converted caballero found an engraving of the Crucifixion, with an exhortation to take the Crucifix in his right hand as the puissant, gladdening, magnanimous, ever-conquering royal sign of the caballeros of God, the Saints'. Similarly, in the Life of Christ translated by Montesino, Inigo would surely have been struck by such a passage as this: 'Our Sovereign Lord and army-commander [caudillo] Jesus desires that the eyes and the countenances of His devout caballería should ever be raised to His life-giving wounds, so that looking in the mirror of His Passion they may become the more valiant for the sufferings and hardships of the battle.'1

The narrative of Inigo's life told by himself continues as follows:

While pondering over what he would do on his return from Jerusalem so as to live always a life of penitence, one idea that occurred to him was to join the Charterhouse at Seville, without disclosing his identity that he might be the less esteemed, and there to eat nothing but herbs.2 But at other times, when he thought over the penances he wanted to perform as he went about the world, his desire for the Carthusian life cooled, because he feared that in it he would be unable to give vent to the hatred against himself which he had conceived. However, he directed a servant of the house who was going to Burgos to make inquiries about the rule of the Charterhouse there, and the information thus received on the subject appealed to him.3 But for the reason just given 1 Cited in Leturia's Gentilhombre, pp. 173-4.

2 The Carthusian monastery just outside Seville, Nuestra Señora de las Cuevas, was famous throughout Spain. Christopher Columbus visited it several times during his stay in the City. In the nineteenth century the liberals sequestrated the monastery and turned it into a pottery.

3 This was the monastery of Miraflores, meaning charmingly, 'Look at the flowers!', to which, in the romance, King Lisuarte of England and his wife retired after abdicating the throne in favour of Amadís and Oriana. It