and of duty. Respect, filial piety, fraternal affection, modesty in prosperity, courage in adversity, magnanimity, Christian purity, — such were the examples which the wool-comber gave to the world. And he whose limited means obliged him to marry his daughter to a pork-butcher, knew, before leaving this world, that the eldest of his sons had enlarged its known space, and that he was Grand Admiral and Viceroy. It was in his children that it pleased God to bless this industrious old man, who, like another Jacob, after having counted, in the long years of his pilgrimage, some good days, some evil days (and the latter were the most numerous), sees himself with complaisance, at the end of his course, live again in a son who is invested with splendor and transcendent glory.
In beginning to write this history, we love to salute at first the respectable image of this artisan, because he humbly served God and his country, labored diligently, did for the education of his children all that his circumstances permitted, and did not raise them egotistically for himself, but generously knew how to let them depart from him in his old age.
Never has the wool-comber of Mulcento Street hitherto received a word of approbation from the biographers of his son. They have limited themselves to saying, "The parents of Columbus were poor, but honest." The certificate of morality given by the Protestant school would have been somewhat disparaging, if it were not ridiculous. Is it that honesty alone could have produced the example of those three sons, who, always respectful and grateful, knew, notwithstanding their straitened circumstances, how to solace the old age of their father, who, faithfully united among themselves, were up to the level of the most difficult enterprises, as well as the most elevated positions; who supported grandeurs as naturally as they did reverses, and who never faltered in their duty on any occasion? Do we observe here nothing above simple morality? Do we not perceive there the essence of
