It is time now to contemplate Ignatius of Loyola at Paris, where some of the most precious elements in his educational experience are to be acquired. CHAPTER III. THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS. ROME. Voluntary poverty, the austerest manner of life, the ungrateful labor of studies, and the perpetual self-discipline of a mind like his, ever bent on lofty thoughts and endeavoring to dominate the very first movements of his soul, all these conditions, added to the climate and the nature of the situation in which Ignatius found himself at Paris, brought such a strain to bear on his broken-down constitution, that, to keep up his course at all, he had to interrupt it awhile, and give some relief to his overtaxed body, or, as he held it to be, his "beast of burden." And what about the studies themselves? If they had been a brilliant success thus far, they could scarcely have outlived such conditions of existence. As it was, they were as good as if they had never begun; or somewhat worse. He had gone about them the wrong way. Whatever solidity of learning he had kept objectively in view, something else, equally important with solidity, had been unwittingly omitted. That was a good method. Logic, Philosophy, and Theology, all taken up together, and with such compendious haste, now went together in his mind like a machine out of joint; and his speed was _nil_! The Latin language itself, the indispensable vehicle of all learning, was just so far possessed by him as to show him that, to be of any real use, it had better be commenced all over again. Here his character asserted itself. And in no particular of his life is he more like himself, more thorough, more of a brave cavalier, "governing himself, in great things and small, by reasons most high," than when, having little facility for such pursuits, and less inclination, he makes up his mind, after a short breathing spell, to sit down again at the age of thirty-seven years, and resume his Latin declensions! In the college of Montague, he spends about two years acquiring this tongue. Meanwhile, he tries various plans to find wherewithal to live.