cil of hair, pen of reed or quill, and ink of many-hued splendors, the artist laid on colors and produced designs which for richness and beauty command our admiration; on papyrus or parchment, writing the headings in bright red; forming the initial letter of a chapter with a brilliant tracery, in scarlet and gold and blue lace-work, of intermingled flowers and birds; tracing in black the thick perpendicular strokes of the text-hand; then when the book is finished-which may be the work of years if the decorations are minute and profuse, painting the title in scarlet, with the name of the copyist in colors at the foot of the last page, and a marginal embroidery of angelic and human figures, birds, beasts and fishes, flowers, shells and leaves.

But as in the natural world every night brightens into a new morning, so in the spiritual the sun of science, having reached its nadir of decline, begins its reascension to the zenith, throwing out many premonitory gleams of light ere the dawn reddens into the lustre of day.

The leading circumstances in the gradual renewal of European thought are the study of civil law, presaging progress in the science of government; the development of modern languages, with its taste for poetry and its swarm of lay poets; the cultivation, in the twelfth century, of Latin classics, quotations from which, however, during the Dark Ages, were hardly to be called unusual; the partial restoration of Greek literature-mathematical, physical, and metaphysical, which, with the exception of scattered instances where some 'petty patristic treatise' or later commentator on Aristotle was rendered into Latin, had been almost entirely forgotten within the pale of the Romish Church, but now in the eleventh century, imported across the Pyrenees into France from the Arab conquerors of Spain, glimmered with pulsation of

That earlier dawn

Whose glimpses are again withdrawn,
As if the morn had waked, and then
Shut close her lids of light again."

Lastly, as the special mark of that new fervor of study which sprang up in the West from its contact with the more civilized East, the institution of universities.

From an early period, in England as well as elsewhere, there were schools, though in general confined to the cathedrals and monasteries, and designed exclusively for religious purposes.

Nor is it to be presumed that the laity, though excluded, as a rule, from the benefits of a liberal training, were left wholly without the means of obtaining some elementary instruction. Canterbury, Yarrow, and York commemorate the golden age of Old English scholarship. Alcuin was called from the last to the court of Charlemagne, to assist him in the educational reform of France. In a letter to his patron he enumerates, in the fantastic rhetoric of the period, the branches in which he instructed his pupils at Paris:

To some I administer the honey of the sacred writings; others I try to inebriate with the wine of the ancient classics. I begin the nourishment of some with the apples of grammatical subtlety. I strive to illuminate many by the arrangement of the stars, as from the painted roof of a lofty palace.'

That is, Grammar, Greek and Latin, Astronomy and Theology. Here is a specimen of the literary conversations of the palace school:

'What is writing?-The guardian of History. What is speech? -The interpreter of the soul. What is it that gives birth to speech? -The tongue. What is the tongue? The whip of the air. What is air?-The preserver of life. What is life?-A joy for the happy, a pain for the miserable, the expectation of death. What is death? -An inevitable event, an uncertain voyage, a subject of tears for the living, the confirmation of testaments, the robber of men. . . . What is heaven?-A moving sphere, an immense vault. What is light?-The torch of all things. What is the day?-A call to labor. What is the sun? -The splendor of the universe, the beauty of the firmament, the grace of nature, the glory of the day, the distributor of the hours. . . . What is friendship? The similarity of souls. . .

'As you are a youth of good disposition, and endowed with natural capacity, I will put to you several other unusual questions: endeavor to solve them.-I will do my best; if I make mistakes, you must correct them. I shall do as you desire. Some one who is unknown to me has conversed with me, having no tongue and no voice; he was not before, he will not be hereafter, and I neither heard nor knew him. What means this? -Perhaps a dream moved you, master? Exactly so, my son. Still another one. I have seen the dead engender the living, and the dead consumed by the breath of the living. -Fire was born from the rubbing of branches, and it consumed the branches.'

Such are the giants of a generation-glimmering lights that, hardly breaking the leaden cloud of ignorance, owe much of their distinction to the surrounding gloom. The studies pursued at York, the same writer informs us, comprehended, besides grammar, rhetoric, and poetry,

'The harmony of the sky, the labor of the sun and moon, the five zones, the seven wandering planets; the laws, risings, and settings of the stars, and the aërial motions of the sea; earthquakes; the nature of man, cattle, birds, and wild beasts, with their various kinds and forms; and the sacred Scriptures.'

In short, a long established division of literary and scientific knowledge was the Trivium, embracing Grammar, Rhetoric, and

Logic; and Quadrivium, embracing Music, Arithmetic, Geometry, and Astronomy; all of which were referred to theology, and that in the narrowest manner. To be perfect in the three former was a rare accomplishment; and scarcely any one mastered the latter four. John of Salisbury, writing in the twelfth century, when the simplicity of this arrangement had been outgrown, says:

'The Trivium and the Quadrivium were so much admired by our ancestors in former ages, that they imagined they comprehended all wisdom and learning, and were sufficient for the solution of all questions and the removing of all difficulties; for whoever understood the Trivium could explain all manner of books without a teacher; but he who was farther advanced, and was master also of Quadrivium, could answer all questions and unfold all the secrets of nature.'

But in the twelfth century, the older educational foundations burst into the larger, freer life of the universities, whose democratic spirit threatened feudalism, and whose intellectual spirit threatened the Church, though to outer seeming they were ecclesiastical bodies. None of these grew so early into fame as that of Paris, unrivalled for theological discussion. Here the rationalism of Abelard, the knight-errant of philosophy, drew down the menaces of councils and the thunders of Rome. Said the Council of Sens in 1140:

'He makes void the whole Christian faith by attempting to comprehend the nature of God through human reason. He ascends up into Heaven; he goes down into hell. Nothing can elude him, either in the height above or in the nethermost depths. His branches spread over the whole earth. He boasts that he has disciples in Rome itself, even in the College of Cardinals. He draws the whole earth after him. It is time, therefore, to silence him by apostolic authority.'

So great was the influx of his disciples, that the boundaries of the city were enlarged. When he retired to solitude the wilderness became a town. Twenty cardinals and fifty bishops had been among his hearers.

At the opening of the thirteenth century, Oxford was second only to Paris in the multitude of its students and the celebrity of its disputations. Thirty thousand scholars, thinking more of success in polemics than of the truths involved, swelled the stir and turbulence of its life. Yet be not deceived. Thousands of pupils poorly lodged, clustering around teachers as poor as themselves, drinking, quarrelling, begging; retainers fighting out the feuds of their young lords in the streets; roisterer and reveller roaming with torches through the dark and filthy lanes, defying bailiffs and cutting down citizens; a tavern row spread

ing into a general broil, bells clanging to arms,- this is the seething, surging Oxford of medieval history. Upon the vision of these young and valiant minds flashed, as they thought, the temple of truth, and they rushed at it headlong, as knightly warriors with battle-axe might storm a castle.

Language. The principal literature was in Latin, and, after the Conquest, in French. The former-the only language in which the scholar might hope to address, not merely the few among a single people, but the whole Republic of Letters-was used in books habitually, as the common language of the educated throughout Europe. In it were written, in particular, most works on subjects of theology, science, and history; in the latter, those intended rather to amuse than to instruct, and addressed, not to students, but to the idlers of the court and the gentry, by whom they were seldom read, but only heard as they were recited or chanted. In the thirteenth century, French acquired that widely diffused currency as a generally known and hence convenient common medium which it has ever since maintained. A Venetian annalist of the time composed his chronicle in it, because, to use his own words: "The French tongue is current throughout the world, and is more delectable to read and hear than any other.' Dante's teacher employed it, and thus apologized for using it instead of Italian:

If any shall ask why this book is written in Romance, according to the patois of France, I being born Italian, I will say it is for divers reasons. The one is that I am now in France; the other is that French is the most delightsome of tongues, and partaketh most of the common nature of all other languages."

Its frequent use by English writers is to be ascribed, not wholly to the predominance of Norman influence, but, in a considerable degree, to the fact that, for the time, it occupied much the same position as had hitherto been awarded to the Latin as the common dialect of learned Europe.

Of the vernacular, many of the most important terms, ethical and mental, had become obsolete. Of foreign words in it, there were yet relatively few. The whole number of Romance derivatives found in the printed works of authors of the thirteenth century scarcely exceeds one thousand, or one-eighth of the total vocabulary of that era. What would the myriad-minded Shakespeare, with his vast requirement of fifteen thousand, have done

in this age, with its pittance of eight thousand words? The following extract is from the Proclamation of Henry III, addressed in 1258 to the people of Huntingdon, copies being sent to all the shires of England and Ireland. Prepositions, it will be observed, are doing the work of the lost inflections; and the sense is made to depend upon the sequence of the words alone:

Henry, thurg Godes fultume
King on Englene-loande . . .
send igretinge to all hise

halde ilaerde and ilaewede.
Thaet witen ye wel alle, thaet we

willen and unnen thaet thaet ure raedes-
men alle other, the moare dael of heom,
thaet beoth ichosen thurg us. . . . And
this wes idon aet foren ure isworene redes-
men. And al on tho ilche worden is
isend in to aeurihce othre schire over all
thaere kuneriche on Englene-loande and ek
intel Irelande.'

'Henry, through God's grace

king in England . . .
sends greeting to all his
subjects, learned and unlearned.
This know ye well all, that we
will and grant, that what our council-
lors all or the more deal of them,
that are chosen by us. . . .
And
this was done before our sworn council-
lors. And all in the same words is
sent into every other shire over all
the kingdom in England and eke
into Ireland.'

The popular speech was forcing its way to the throne.

Poetry.—In early periods, feeling and fancy, with nations as with children, are strongest. Emotion seeks utterance before logic; and the natural expression of emotion is a chant, a song. There is a real kinship between the waves of excited feeling and the rhythmical cadence of words which utter it. Early literature, therefore, is almost exclusively one of poetry. Language, too, then picturesque and bold, lives chiefly on the tongue and in the ear; and poetry, by its rhythm, uniting with the charm of music, allows an oral transfer which prose does not. Rhythm—the recurrence of sounds and silences at regular intervals of time, the essential principle of poetry-is the oldest and widest artistic instinct in man; for man is the emotive part of nature, and the movement of nature, it is the grand distinction of modern science to have shown, is rhythmic. Light and heat go in undulations; the seasons, the sun-spots, come and go in correspondencies; the variable stars brighten and pale at rhythmic intervals; the oceantides and trade-winds flow by rhythmic rule; planet, satellite, and comet revolve and return in proportionate periods. The mystic Hindoo's doctrine of the primal diffusion of matter in space, the aggregation of atoms into worlds, the revolution of these worlds, their necessary absorption into Brahma, their necessary rediffusion, again to be aggregated, and again to be absorbed,—ever