the virtues that I once possessed

NOTES

the virtues that I once possessed

The Creature acknowledges his fall from an original state of grace: "virtues" seems to be deliberately Miltonic diction, invoking Satan and Adam (and Eve). The Biblical context aside, this claim to a prelapsarian perfection is intended to remind Victor of his own high ambition (see I:3:8) and to affirm how well, on an internal if not external plane, it was realized.