CHAPTER XXIV.
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.