• 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.