I had now entirely lost my trade, so that I had not the least temptation to
stay longer in a city where I was certain of receiving daily affronts and
rebukes. I therefore made up my affairs with the utmost expedition, and,
scraping together all I could, retired into the country, where I spent the
remainder of my days in universal contempt, being shunned by everybody,
perpetually abused by my wife, and not much respected by my children.«
    »Minos told me, though I had been a very vile fellow, he thought my
sufferings made some atonement, and so bid me take the other trial.«
 

                              Chapter Twenty-Four

           Julian recounts what happened to him while he was a poet.

Rome was now the seat of my nativity, where I was born of a family more
remarkable for honour than riches. I was intended for the church, and had a
pretty good education; but my father dying while I was young, and leaving me
nothing, for he had wasted his whole patrimony, I was forced to enter myself in
the order of mendicants.
    »When I was at school I had a knack of rhiming, which I unhappily mistook
for genius, and indulged to my cost; for my verses drew on me only ridicule, and
I was in contempt called the poet.«
    »This humour pursued me through my life. My first composition after I left
school was a panegyric on pope Alexander IV., who then pretended a project of
dethroning the king of Sicily. On this subject I composed a poem of about
fifteen thousand lines, which with much difficulty I got to be presented to his
holiness, of whom I expected great preferment as my reward; but I was cruelly
disappointed: for when I had waited a year, without hearing any of the
commendations I had flattered myself with receiving, and being now able to
contain no longer, I applied to a Jesuit who was my relation, and had the pope's
ear, to know what his holiness's opinion was of my work: he coldly answered me
that he was at that time busied in concerns of too much importance to attend the
reading of poems.«
    »However dissatisfied I might be, and really was, with this reception, and
however angry I was with the pope, for whose understanding I entertained an
immoderate contempt, I was not yet discouraged from a second attempt.
Accordingly, I soon after produced another work, entitled, The Trojan Horse.
This was an allegorical work, in which the church was introduced into the world
in the same manner as that machine had been
