On the marriage of his mother, Vittorio and his sister went to live in their father-in-law's house, who proved himself a kind parent to the orphans. Although his health was not robust, Alfieri's childhood was little interrupted by sickness; and his first grief was experienced at the age of seven, when his sister Julia was sent to a convent for her education. Although he was, at first, permitted to see her every day, yet he felt, on her removal from the parental roof, that violence of emotion and boiling of the blood which was apt to seize on him, in after life, when forced to separate from any one to whom he was warmly attached. Thus his sensibility developed itself early; and sensibility and pride, both exalted into passions rather than feelings, were always the prominent traits of his disposition, and which at last, from the excessive influence they exercised over him, generated that gloomy melancholy to which he was a victim. Alfieri remained at home, under the tutelage of a worthy priest, named Don Ivaldi, with whose assistance he began to learn the rudiments of Latin. His disposition was, for the most part, taciturn and placid: now and then he became loquacious and gay in the extreme, and, at other times, the melancholy already nascent in his heart, filled him with strange and passionate thoughts. He was obstinate when treated unkindly, but readily yielded to affection; and, above all, he was susceptible, to a painful degree, of the sense of shame. When, as a punishment for childish faults, any sort of public penance was imposed on him, he endured such transports of agony as affected his health for weeks.