“An abuse which I took worse than all the rest, as she had been constantly for several years assiduous in railing at the opposition, in siding with the court-party, and begging me to come over to it; and especially after my mentioning the offer of knighthood to her, since which time she had continually interrupted my repose with dinning in my ears the folly of refusing honors and of adhering to a party and to principles by which I was certain of procuring no advantage to myself and my family.
“I had now entirely lost my trade, so that I had not the least temptation to stay longer in a city where I was certain of receiving daily affronts and rebukes. I therefore made up my affairs with the utmost expedition, and, scraping together all I could, retired into the country, where I spent the remainder of my days in universal contempt, being shunned by everybody, perpetually abused by my wife, and not much respected by my children.
“Minos told me, though I had been a very vile fellow, he thought my sufferings made some atonement, and so bid me take the other trial.”
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.