ripple; but
as I approached my sixteenth year, nature displayed in my favour her
mysterious energies: my constitution was fortified and fixed, and my
disorders most wonderfully vanished.

Without preparation or delay, my father carried me to Oxford, and I was
matriculated in the university as a gentleman commoner of Magdalen
College before I had accomplished the fifteenth year of my age. As often
as I was tolerably exempt from danger and pain, reading, free desultory
reading, had been the employment and comfort of my solitary hours, and I
was allowed, without control or advice, to gratify the wanderings of an
unripe taste. My indiscriminate appetite subsided by degrees into the
historic line; and I arrived at Oxford with a stock of erudition that
might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a
schoolboy would have been ashamed.

The happiness of boyish years I have never known, and that time I have
never regretted. To the university of Oxford I acknowledge no
obligation. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College, and they proved
the fourteen months the most idle and profitless of my whole life. The
sum of my improvement there is confined to three or four Latin plays. It
might at least be expected that an ecclesiastical school should
inculcate the orthodox principles of religion. But our venerable mother
had contrived to unite the opposite extremes of bigotry and
indifference. The blind activity of idleness urged me to advance without
armour into the dangerous mazes of controversy, and at the age of
sixteen I bewildered myself in the errors of the church of Rome.
Translations of two famous works of Bossuet achieved my conversion, and
surely I fell by a noble hand.

No sooner had I settled my new religion than I resolved to profess
myself a Catholic, and on June 8, 1753, I solemnly abjured the errors of
heresy. An elaborate controversial epistle, addressed to my father,
announced and justified the step which I had taken. My father was
neither a bigot nor a philosopher, but his affection deplored the loss
of an only son, and his good sense was astonished at my departure from
the religion of my country. In the first sally of passion, he divulged a
secret which prudence might have suppressed, and the gates of Magdalen
College were for ever shut against my return.

_II.--A Happy Exile_

It was necessary for my father to form a new plan of education, and
effect the cure of my spiritual malady. Aft