WOUNDED IN ALL WAYS. 23 



ing the bag of Fazio, and from all serious labour for a time 1 . 

 During this period of convalescence, when he was living 

 in the street Dei Maini, the weak boy fell from a ladder 

 with a hammer in his hand, and was taken up with a 

 serious wound, in which the bone was injured at the upper 

 part of his forehead, on the left side 2 . The scar left by 

 the wound remained visible throughout the whole of his 

 after-life 2 . He had recovered from this blow, when one 

 day, as he was sitting on the threshold of his father's door, 

 a tile fell from the roof of a high adjoining house, and 

 wounded him on the top of his head, again on the left 

 side 3 . When Jerome was in tolerable health, his father 

 fagged him ; when sickness gave him liberty to idle, these 

 accidents disturbed his rest. He had no breast at home 

 that he could lay his head upon in perfect peace ; he saw 

 passions at work about him, or felt them at work upon him 

 from the first, chafing his fresh heart, and checking the 

 free outward current of his thoughts. His wit was of the 

 quickest, and his nature sensitive ; he felt every slight, and 

 soon began to brood over the wrongs he suffered, to pre- 

 serve in stillness his own thoughts of impatience at in- 

 justice, and acquired that unwholesome self-consciousness 

 that is too often forced into the minds of clever children, 

 not only by too much praise, but also by unjust neglect. 



1 De Propr. Vit. p. 14. 



2 De Util. ex Adr. Capiend. p. 428. De Propr. Vit. pp. 14, 15. 



3 De Propr. Vita Liber, p. 15. 



