e in
that distaste, and he who writes loathed Greek like poison--till he came
to Homer. Latin the Saint loved, except "when reading, writing, and
casting of accounts was taught in Latin, which I held not for lesse
paynefull or penal than the very Greeke. I wept for Dido's death, who
made herselfe away with the sword," he declares, "and even so, the saying
that two and two makes foure was an ungrateful song in mine ears; whereas
the wooden horse full of armed men, the burning of Troy, and the very
Ghost of Creusa, was a most delightful spectacle of vanity."

In short, the Saint was a regular Boy--a high-spirited, clever, sportive,
and wilful creature. He was as fond as most boys of the mythical tales,
"and for that I was accounted to be a towardly boy." Meanwhile he does
not record that Monica disliked his learning the foolish dear old heathen
fables--"that flood of hell!"

Boyhood gave place to youth, and, allowing for the vanity of
self-accusation, there can be little doubt that the youth of Saint
Augustine was _une jeunesse orageuse_. "And what was that wherein I took
delight but to love and to be beloved." There was ever much sentiment
and affection in his amours, but his soul "could not distinguish the
beauty of chast love from the muddy darkness of lust. Streams of them
did confusedly boyl in me"--in his African veins. "With a restless kind
of weariness" he pursued that Other Self of the Platonic dream,
neglecting the Love of God:

"Oh, how late art thou come, O my Joy!"

The course of his education--for the Bar, as we should say--carried him
from home to Carthage, where he rapidly forgot the pure counsels of his
mother "as old wife's consailes." "And we delighted in doing ill, not
only for the pleasure of the fact, but even for the affection of prayse."
Even Monica, it seems, justified the saying:

"Every woman is at heart a Rake."

Marriage would have been his making, Saint Augustine says, "but she
desired not even that so very much, lest the cloggs of a wife might have
hindered her hopes of me . . . In the meantime the reins were loosed to
me beyond reason." Yet the sin which he regrets most bitterly was
nothing more dreadful than the robbery of an orchard! Pears he had in
plenty, none the less he went, with a band of roisterers, and pillaged
another man's pear tree. "I loved the sin, not that which I obtained by
the same, but I loved the sin itself." There lay the sting of it! They
we