The latter will be found a most valuable summary.] He could boast but little education; and his favorite reading was in _Amadis of Gaul_.

That romance appeared during the boy's earliest childhood, and Spain was now devouring its high-flown rhapsodies with rapture.

The peculiar admixture of mystical piety, Catholic enthusiasm, and chivalrous passion, which distinguishes _Amadis_, exactly corresponded to the spirit of the Spaniards at an epoch when they had terminated their age-long struggle with the Moors, and were combining propagandist zeal with martial fervor in the conquest of the New World.
Its pages inflamed the imagination of Ignatius.

He began to compose a romance in honor of S.Peter, and chose a princess of blood royal for his Oriana.

Thus, in the first days of youth, while his heart was still set on love and warfare, he revealed the three leading features of his character--soaring ambition, the piety of a devotee, and the tendency to view religion from the point of fiction.
Ignatius was barely twenty when the events happened which determined the future of his life and so powerfully affected the destinies of Catholic Christendom.