CHAPTER XII.
The College suffered a great loss by the premature and unexpected death in 1834 of the Vice-President, Father Le Clerc. Born in 1799 of a French father and an English mother in the county of York, he received his first education at Sedgely Park, whence he passed to Lisbon in 1814. From the time of his entrance into the College he was remarkable for his talents and piety, and he always manifested such gravity of demeanour that it might be said of him that he had never been a boy. The high estimation in which he was universally held, warranted his appointment over the other students as General Prefect at the early age of eighteen, and his subsequent rapid promotion to the position of Vice-President. From the time of his entering upon this office, in 1829, he had always been of the greatest possible assistance to the President in the difficult times, during which the College was being reconstituted, after the departure of the French from Lisbon. He was an assiduous student especially of the natural sciences, and he has left evidence of his power and unction as a preacher in the sermons which he contributed to the Catholic Pulpit, all of them most beautiful specimens of pulpit oratory. During the dreadful scourge of cholera, which in 1833 well nigh decimated Lisbon, with the greatest zeal and unwearied self-sacrifice and devotion he attended the sick in the hospitals, and it was while visiting the Military Hospital that, in the following year, he caught the fever of which he died. He was buried in the cemetery attached to the college garden, and a monument bearing the following epitaph was erected to his memory.
