These first loves of Augustin were really too fierce to last. They burned up themselves. Augustin did not keep them up long. There was in him, besides, an instinct which counteracted his exuberant, amorous sentimentality--the sense of beauty. That in itself was enough to make him pause on the downhill of riot. The anarchy and commotion of passion was repellent to a mind devoted to clearness and order. But there was still another thing--the son of the Thagaste freeholder had any amount of common sense. That at least was left to him of the paternal heritage. A youth of what we call the lower middle class, strictly brought up in the hard and frugal discipline of the provinces, he felt the effects of his training. The bohemianism in which his friends revelled could not hold him indefinitely. Besides this, the career he desired, that of a barrister or professor, had a preliminary obligation to maintain a certain outward decorum. He himself tells us so; in the midst of his most disreputable performances he aspired to be known for his fashion and wit--_elegans atque urbanus_. Politeness of speech and manners, the courteous mutual deference of the best society--such, was the ideal of this budding professor of rhetoric. Anxiety about his future, joined to his rapid disenchantments, ere long sobered the student: he just took his fling and then settled down. Love turned for him into sensual habit. His head became clear for study and meditation. The apprentice to rhetoric liked his business. Up to his last breath, despite his efforts to change, he continued, like all his contemporaries, to love rhetoric. He handled words like a worker in verbals who is aware of their price and knows all their resources. Even after his conversion, if he condemns profane literature as a poisoner of souls, he absolves the beauty of language. "I accuse not words," he says. "Words are choice and precious vessels. I accuse the wine of error that drunken doctors pour out for us into these fair goblets." At the Rhetoric School he took extreme pleasure in declaiming. He was applauded; the professor gave him as an example to the others. These scholastic triumphs foretold others more celebrated and reverberating. And so, in his heart, literary vanity and ambition disputed the ever-lively illusions of love. And then, above all! he had to live; Monnica's remittances were necessarily small; the generosity of Romanianus had its limit. So he beat about to enlarge his small student's purse. He wrote verses for poetic competitions. Perhaps already he was able to act as tutor to certain of his fellow-students, less advanced.