s idea must either have been
prompted by a sort of crazy fear of the far-reaching power of the
Jesuits, or by the inaccuracy of his memory with regard to many early
impressions.

That he was sent to Ushaw with a view to entering the priesthood is
incorrect. The education at Ushaw is by no means exclusively devoted to
preparing boys for the priesthood. In a letter to his brother, he says:
"You are misinformed as to Grand-Aunt educating your brother for the
priesthood. He had the misfortune to spend some years in Catholic
Colleges, where the educational system chiefly consists of keeping the
pupils as ignorant as possible. I was not even a Catholic."

Monsignor Corbishly, the late ecclesiastical head of Ushaw College and a
school-fellow of Lafcadio's, stated that if there were any ideas on the
part of Hearn's relatives that he should enter the priesthood, the
authorities of Ushaw College, as soon as they had become aware of the
"mental and moral tendencies" of the boy, would have decided that he was
quite unfit to become a member of the Roman Catholic priesthood. This
disposes of one of the many Hearn myths.

That non-success should have attended the endeavours of the authorities
of Ushaw and that most of his contemporaries, now shining lights in the
Church of Rome, should refer to Lafcadio Hearn as a "painful subject"
was a foregone conclusion. The same fanciful, vagrant, original spirit
that had characterised his childhood, characterised him apparently in
his college career. Besides an emphatic antagonism to laws and
conventions, a distinguishing characteristic of his was a horror of
forms and ceremonies; one of the manifestations that fascinated him in
Shintoism and Buddhism later was their worship of nature and entire
absence of ceremonial or doctrinal teaching.

All the aims and thoughts of his boyish heart were directed against
prescribed studies and ordinary grooves of thought. A rebellion against
restraint, a something explosive and incalculable, places Hearn amongst
those whom the French term _desequilibres_, one of those ill-poised and
erratic spirits, whose freaks and eccentricities are so nearly allied to
madness.

Besides his rebellion against restraint, his dislike to ecclesiasticism
was artistic and aesthetic.

Before he came to college his mind, as we have seen, was kindled and
informed with enthusiasm for natural beauty and the grace of the ancient
Hellenic idea. And from nature and Hellenic ideas,