UNDER THE ROD. 13 



him, and administered a due share of the prickliest paternal 

 discipline. The ill-treatment of the neglected boy was not, 

 however, constant though the hands of his father and 

 mother were against him, their hearts were with him he 

 was, on the whole, treated less unkindly than before. His 

 parents had ill-regulated tempers, and the child became 

 the victim of the passions out of which he was unluckily 

 begotten 1 . Flagellation from his father and his mother, 

 and his pitiless aunt, Margherita, impressed upon his 

 memory three miserable years after his first arrival at 

 Milan. At the end of those years, when his age was 

 seven, and he had often been brought even to the point 

 of death by the results of too incessant punishment, a 

 respite followed. Father, mother, and Aunt Margaret 

 perceived that the weak child, who had up to this time 

 been suffering from a long series of bodily distempers, 

 could be knocked about no longer without certain danger 

 to his life; and so it happened, as the boy himself ex- 

 pressed it afterwards, that when he became old enough to 

 do things by which he could fairly merit blows, it was 

 found requisite to leave off beating him. 



In that after-life, to which allusion has been made just 

 now, I ought to say at once, that the son is never to be 



1 " Ambobus parentibus commune fuit iracundus esse, parum con- 

 stanter etiam in amore filii." De Propr. Vit. p. 11. 



2 " Turn primum cum merito possem verberibus dignus haberi, a 

 yerberibus abstinendum decreverunt." De Propr. Vit. p. 13. 



