Despina was formed for love and life, not for the nun’s veil and cloistered cell; to which, according to a custom too common in Italian families, she had been vowed in infancy by her parents. It was my fate to love her passionately and truly, when few others would have dared to look impurely upon the affianced bride of Heaven: one from her childhood vowed to Madonna. She was an orphan, and her guardians—an avaricious aunt, and Ser Vignola, a rascally notary of the Strada di Toledo—to procure the reversion of her little patrimony, kept before her continually the enormity of not fulfilling the vows of her parents. In Italy, one is more prone to fall in love at church than any other place: this may perhaps account for the numerous intrigues of our female ecclesiastics. There is a mysterious influence in our religious service—a mixture of heavenly aspirations and earth-born delights, which powerfully awakens the better feelings of our nature; softening the heart and rendering it more sensitive to tender and lasting impressions. Was it not at church that Petrarch first beheld the bright-haired Laura, whose beauty shed a light on his pilgrimage through life for twenty years after? Ah, signor! our holy religion belongs to the days of poetry and romance! None but an Italian can know what a first love is to an Italian heart; or how ardently and wildly the tender passion burns beneath these sunny skies. In those days I was a young alfiero (or ensign) in Florestan’s Battalion of the Guards, and my daily attendance at the church of Spirito Santo soon became a standing jest at our mess and a topic for laughter to my gay companions; who were quite at a loss to comprehend the reason of such sudden and rigid attendance to the duties of religion. An aged aunt of mine, who departed about that time in all the glory of virginity, out of her admiration of my piety put a codicil to her will by which 50,000 ducats became mine, instead of being poured into the treasury of the Greek Padri of St. Basil, as she had first intended.