its first accurate acquaintance with the Koran. Travelling in Spain, he was convinced how important it was that the Church should be thoroughly acquainted with that system with which it was in hostile contact, and at a great cost he caused a translation of the Koran into Latin to be made. That he should have done this, is alone sufficient to mark him as no common man. He has also himself written a refutation of Mahometanism. He died in 1156. The poems which bear his name are not considerable in bulk, nor can they be esteemed of any very high order of merit. Yet apart from their interest as productions of one who played so important a part in the history of his age, these lines which immediately follow, and another hymn occupying a later place in this volume, will be allowed to possess a sufficient worth of their own to justify their insertion. VIII. DE NATIVITATE DOMINI. YELUM gaude, terra plaude, CLU Nemo mutus sit in laude: Auctor rerum creaturam Miseratus perituram, Præbet dextram libertatis Jam ab hoste captivatis. Coelum terræ fundit rorem, Terra gignit Salvatorem. VIII. Bibliotheca Cluniacensis, Paris, 1614, p. 1349. 5 Chorus cantat Angelorum, Cùm sit infans Rex eorum. Matris alitur intactæ Res stupenda sæculis! Per quem cuncta manent plena; [T. L. P.] 7 ALANUS. A LANUS de Insulis, that is, of Lille in Flanders, called Doctor Universalis from the extent of his acquirements, was born in the first half of the twelfth century, and died at the beginning of the next. His life is as perplexed a skein for the biographer to disentangle as can well be imagined, abundantly justifying the axiom of Bacon: Citius emergit veritas ex errore quàm ex confusione-the great perplexity arising here from the difficulty of determining whether he and an Alanus, also de Insulis, the friend of St Bernard and bishop of Auxerre, be one and the same person. The Biographie Universelle corrected this as an error, although a generally received one; Oudinus, it is true, had already shewn the way; (De Script. Eccles., v. 2, p. 1389-1404;) but Guericke and Neander again identify the two. The question, however, does not belong to this volume. The Doctor Universalis is undoubtedly the poet, and it is only with the poet we are here concerned. The only collected edition of his works was published by Charles de Visch, Antwerp, 1654; a volume not easily to be met with. It was only in the National Library at Paris that I was able to get sight of it, and to obtain a perfect copy of a very beautiful Ode, inserted later in this volume. His Parables were a favourite book before the revival of learning; but the work of his which enjoyed the highest reputation was a long moral poem, entitled Anti-Claudianus, it does not very clearly appear why. (See Leyser, p. 1017, who is very copious in his extracts from it.) I know not whether it will bear out the praises which have been bestowed upon it and on its author. One says of him (Leyser, p. 1020): Inter ævi sui poëtas facilè familiam duxit; and Oudinus, v. 2, p. 1405, characterizes the poem as singulari festivitate, lepore, et elegantiâ conscriptum; see also Rambach, Anthol. Christl. Gesänge, v. 1, p. 329. Certainly the following lines, Ovidian both in their merits and defects, are the writing of a poet. They are the description of a natural Paradise: Est locus ex nostro secretus climate, tractu The following lines form part, or as Oudinus asserts, 1 Elsewhere he has this couplet: Ver, quasi fullo novus, reparando pallia pratis the whole, of the genuine epitaph of Alanus. The last of them is striking enough: Alanum brevis hora brevi tumulo sepelivit, Qui duo, qui septem, qui totum scibile scivit; IX. DE NATIVITATE DOMINI. IC est qui, carnis intrans ergastula nostræ, Se pœnæ vinxit, vinctos ut solveret; æger IX. Alani Opera, ed. C. de Visch, Antwerp, 1654, p. 377. |