Page:Vol 1 History of Mexico by H H Bancroft.djvu/163

Rh secured in his behalf Saint Peter, thenceforth his patron With his mother's milk he drank courage and intelligence, and he was schooled in the virtues and the vices of the day. In his youth he was headstrong, but chivalrous, and he revelled in his superiority over other boys. The brain-ferment, chronic throughout his life, set in at an early day. He was keenly sensitive to disgrace. As he developed somewhat of archness and duplicity, he was deemed best fitted for the profession of the law. At the age of fourteen, accordingly, with such preparation as the slender means of the father would allow, he was sent to Salamanca, whose university, though past the zenith of its fame, was still the leading seat of learning for conservative Spain. Two years of restraint and intellectual drudgery, during which time he lived with his father's brother-in-law, Nuñez de Valera, sufficed to send him home surfeited with learning, to the great disappointment of his family. A frolicsome and somewhat turbulent disposition, more marked since his college career than previously, made his return all the more unwelcome. Not that his studies,