It was not long before the efforts of Miranda began to be seconded by those of other distinguished and high-spirited South Americans. Simon Bolivar, the liberator himself, accompanied by a tutor, was sent by his parents to gain an intimate knowledge of Europe and of the polite arts of the Old Continent. Here he had plunged himself into Latin classics and the French philosophy, and his remarkable personality is said to have created no small impression upon those with whom he came into contact. Venezuela has every right to be proud of the fact that, although the seeds of liberty had already been sown throughout the Continent, and especially in the River Plate Provinces, they first sprouted into material activity in Venezuela, for Bolivar, having been born at Caracas, could claim Miranda as a fellow-countryman, or rather as a neighbour, since theoretically, in the colonial days, all South Americans were fellow-countrymen. It is certain that during this early European tour of Bolivar's he had already become strongly imbued with the idea of freeing his country and Continent from the rule of Spain. At one period of his travels he was at Rome, and he is said to have chosen the holy city as the spot in which to swear a solemn oath to take his share in the liberation of his native land--an oath which, as history proves, he fulfilled in generous measure, since the first desperate fights in the north of the Continent were conducted on the patriot side under his auspices and those of Miranda. In the face of all the trials and injustices which they had undergone, it is important to remember that the temperament of the South Americans was one which urged them strongly to remain loyal to the Mother Country. Although it had now become evident that a rupture was inevitable, the colonists viewed the snapping of the ties which bound them to Spain with reluctance and unease. As fate would have it, it was the situation in Europe which arose to solve the difficulty, and to remove the last doubt from the breasts of the South American patriots. The news of catastrophe after catastrophe filtered slowly through from the peninsula to the colonies. The Napoleonic armies had overrun the country; the Corsican's talons were now fixed deeply in its soil, and the rightful Sovereign had abdicated while the throne was being seized upon by Joseph Buonaparte. Then came the news of a Spanish _junta_, formed as a last resource to organize a defence of the harassed country; after this followed tidings of dissensions among the numbers of these defenders themselves, of the formation of other _juntas_, and, in fact, of the prevalence of complete desolation and catastrophe and of the wildest confusion.