hair to grow long over his shoulders, and composing songs, not to the taste of his tutors, he was considered half-mad, and his father was informed of his strange conduct as not amenable to study and discipline. On going home for the vacation, his father therefore received him with coldness and displeasure, and made him read law with him, notwithstanding his continued disinclination to it, though in secret he made amends for the restraint by indulging in reading more agreeable to himself. It is recorded more especially that he then studied the Sacred Scriptures, in whose pages he found the truest inspiration of poetry, as he certainly seems in his writings generally to have imbibed the purest principles of morality and religion.
In the hope of his entering on a more diligent course of study at another place than Toledo, Zorrilla was then sent to Valladolid, as if by changing universities he could be expected to change the tendency of mind which urged him to his destiny. There he was watched on all sides by his father's directions, and it was reported to him that his son still continued his former course of conduct; that instead of passing his hours in study, he was ever out on lonely walks, lying under the shade of trees by the side of the river or the broken rock, absorbed in his own meditations. There is a hint also given, of even the discovery that he had found some dream of youthful love to indulge in, as if it were something extraordinary for one of his age and enthusiastic character. The father must have been one of the class that Chateaubriand suffered under, or Mirabeau; and happy it was for Zorrilla that he did not sink into the recklessness of the one or the inanities of the other, while he had also to submit to similar discouragements. As it was, the father came to the conclusion that no hope was to be entertained of his son's application to study, to take that position in the world which he had
