ANCESTORS OF THE AUTHOR.
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and Lafayette, to aid the North American republicans intheir efforts to break the yoke of British arbitrary dominion.In the course of that sacred war Don Leandro was slain;Don Felix and my father both received honourable wounds.The latter suffered only a brief illness, after having abayonet passed quite through his body, entering under theright arm, and making its exit under and wounding theleft. In the end, Don Felix returned to Rome , entered thechurch, and recently died there, a bishop.
During the period of peace which preceded the French revolution, my father travelled over the greater part ofEurope and part of Asia. At Constantinople his career wasnearly being brought to a close. A Turk, inflamed by jea-lousy (founded or unfounded, I cannot say), proceeded, withseveral armed associates, towards an apartment on the secondfloor of a house in which my father was certainly present atthe time. The case must have been urgent, for maugre myfather’s great bravery and bodily prowess, he judged it bestto make his exit by the window; in effecting which he savedhis life, but dislocated his right shoulder, which ever afterdiffered a little from its fellow in symmetrical position. Somel time after this my father set up a school at Gibraltar , in■ which he taught the Greek, Latin, French, Spanish , andItalian languages, besides Mathematics , and the commonitems of schooling. From this establishment he was expelledby the “ authorities,” who—panders to despotic power,—advocates of all abuses on which their tribe does fatten;apostles of that darkness which they hope will hide theirpeculations; fearing the light of education, save that whichis discoloured by the fraudulent lenses of their own con-struction, they pronounced my father’s principles to be'‘democratic”—“dangerous”—“subversive!” He leftGibraltar and its governors “by the grace of God ”; and I,unable to follow him in any of his further peregrinations,