turned himself, of his own motion, on the side of learning; and, as he
had a quick conception, a happy memory, and a penetrating mind, he
advanced wonderfully in few years.

Having gained a sufficient knowledge in the Latin tongue, and discovered
a great propensity to learning, he was sent to the university of Paris,
the most celebrated of all Europe, and to which the gentlemen of Spain,
Italy, and Germany, resorted for their studies.

He came to Paris in the eighteenth year of his age, and fell immediately
on the study of philosophy. 'Tis scarcely credible with how much ardour
he surmounted the first difficulties of logic. Whatsoever his
inclinations were towards a knowledge so crabbed and so subtle, he tugged
at it with incessant pains, to be at the head of all his fellow students;
and perhaps never any scholar besides himself could join together so much
ease, and so much labour.

Xavier minded nothing more, than how to become an excellent philosopher,
when his father, who had a numerous family of children, and who was one
of those men of quality, whose fortunes are not equal to their birth, was
thinking to remove him from his studies, after having allowed him a
competent maintenance for a year or two. He communicated these his
thoughts to Magdalen. Jasso, his daughter, abbess of the convent of St
Clare de Gandia, famous for the austerity of its rules, and established
by some holy Frenchwomen of that order, whom the calamities of war had
forced to forsake their native country, and to seek a sanctuary in the
kingdom of Valencia.

Magdalen, in her younger days, had been maid of honour and favourite to
the Catholic queen Isabella. The love of solitude, and of the cross, had