mind were the first principles of a true and fruitful philosophy. But to commit to parchment all that he had been pining to say would cost him sixty pounds in materials, transcribers, necessary references, and experiments. He was a Franciscan, vowed to poverty, and the pope had sent no money with the command to write. Bacon's exiled mother and brothers had spent all they were worth upon their ransoms Poor friends furnished the necessary money, some of them by pawning goods, upon the understanding that their loans would be made known to his holiness. Bishop Grosseteste was now dead, and there was a difficulty between the philosopher and his immediate superiors, because the Pope's command was private, and only a relief to Bacon's private conscience. His immediate rulers had received no orders to relax the discipline wrich deprived Franciscans of the luxury of pen and ink. But obstacles were overcome, and then Roger Bacon produced within a year and a half, 1268-9, his Opus Majus (Greater Work), which now forms a large closely-printed folio; his Opus Minus (Lesser Work), which was sent after the Opus Majus to Pope Clement, to recapitulate its arguments and strengthen some of its parts; and his Opus Tertium (Third Work), which followed as a summary and introduction to the whole, enriched with further novelty, and prefaced with a detail of the difficulties against which its author had contended-details necessary to be given, because, he said, that he might obey the pope's command the friar had pawned to poor men the credit of the Holy See. These books, produced by Roger Bacon at the close of Henry III.'s reign, and when he was himself fifty-three years old, rejected nearly all that was profitless, and fastened upon all that there was with life and power of growth in the knowledge of his time. They set out with a principle in which Bacon the Friar first laid foundations of the philosophy of Bacon the Chancellor of later time. He said that there were four grounds of human ignorance: trust in inadequate authority; the force of custom; the opinion of the inexperienced crowd; and the hiding of one's own ignorance with the parading of a superficial wisdom. Roger Bacon advocated the free honest questioning of Nature; and where books were requisite authorities, warned men against the errors that arose from reading them in bad translations. He would have had all true students endeavour to read the original texts of the Bible and of Aristotle. He dwelt on the importance of a study of mathematics, adding a particular consideration of optics, and ending with the study of Nature by experiment, which, he said, is at the root of all other sciences, and a basis of religion. Roger Bacon lived into the reign of Edward I., and died in the year 1292. Contemporary with him was Michael Scot, of Balwirie, who travelled abroad, was honoured at the Sicilian court of Frederick II., translated into Latin the Arabian Avicenna's "History of Animals," and wrote a Mensa Philosophica about the time when Bacon was working upon his " Opus Majus." Michael Scot, the date of whose birth is unknown, died in 1291, a year before Roger Bacon. 34 Side by side with this development of a true spirit in philosophy, the steady endeavour towards right and justice which arose out of the character of its people had enabled England to maintain the rights of subjects against all wrong doing of their kings. Progress made since the days of Henry II. is illustrated in the reign of Henry III. by the appearance of a jurist, Henry of Bracton, who wrote a book with the same title as Glanville's, written in Henry II.'s reign, Upon the Laws and Customs of England. Of Bracton himself it is only known that he wrote his treatise in the reign of Henry III., probably between the years 1256 and 1259, that it proves him to have been a lawyer by profession, deeply read in Roman law, and that he must have been the Justiciary Henry of Bracton mentioned in judicial records of 1246, 1252, 1255, and other years, to 1267 inclusive. He was a judge therefore from 1245 to 1267, if not longer. There is reason to think he was a clerk in orders before he became a lawyer. In his treatise he does not, like Glanville, avoid dealing with first principles. English law had, during the seventy years between Glanville's book (ch. iv. § 20) and Bracton's, been developed into a science, and the time was come for the first scientific commentary on its rules. Bracton painted accurately, in the five books into which his work is divided, the state of the law in his time, and he digested it into a logical system. The king's place in its system Bracton thus defined: "The king must not be subject to any man, but to God and the Law; for the Law makes him king. Let the king, therefore, give to the Law what the Law gives to him, dominion and power; for there is no king where Will, and not Law, bears rule." 35. There is the same evidence of national growth in the increasing boldness of the chroniclers. Roger of Wendover, TO A.D. 1272] CHRONICLERS 83 in Buckinghamshire, was a monk of St. Albans, who became precentor of the abbey, and afterwards prior of Belvoir, a cell attached to St. Albans, from which office he was, about the year 1219, deposed for his extravagance. Recalled to St. Albans, Roger of Wendover died there about the year 1237. He wrote under the name of Flowers of History (Flores Historiarum) a History of the World from the Creation, in two books, the first extending to the birth of Christ; the second to the 19th year of Henry III. The latter part of the chronicle, describing the forty or fifty years before 1235, is his own manly and impartial history of his own time. Matthew Paris a younger man, and also monk of St. Albans, who perhaps was called of Paris from having been there for study, made free use of Roger of Wendover's "Flowers of History" in his own larger chronicle, which he called Historia Major. Indeed, for his detail of events before 1235 he simply annexed Roger of Wendover with a few variations and additions. From that date to 1273 Matthew Paris wrote his own fully detailed journal of the history of his own times, and claimed unsparing liberty in the discussion of events. Monk as he was, he spoke plain language of "the pope and the king, who favoured and abetted each other in their mutual tyranny." 36. We now pass from the reign of Henry III. to that of Edward I. (1272—1307), at whose accession Dante was a child of seven years old. We must, therefore, glance abroad again before discussing the next stage of our own literature. We have seen (ch. iii. § 2) how, in our Henry II.'s time, throughout Europe writers were arising who spoke for the people; and it has been said that there was in Europe a Court literature for the luxurious few, as well as a National literature for the many. The tales of the trouvères of Northern France, if written for the rich, were astir with action which gave pleasure to all lively minds, and they could be recited to the people at their merrymakings. The love-singing of the troubadours had no such currency. It was a part of the idleness of the idle. In the twelfth century a chaplain of the French Court named André wrote a book on the "Art of Loving," wherein he cited and described incidentally the Courts of Love, with which, in Northern and Southern France, great ladies amused themselves, from the middle of the twelfth century until the end of the fourteenth. André quotes, among others, the Courts of Love of the ladies of Gascony; of Ermengard, Viscountess of Narbonne; of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, married in 1137 to Louis VII. of France, and afterwards wife of Henry II. of England. The troubadours and their historian, Jean of Notre Dame, speak of the Courts of Love established in Provence, at Pierrefeu, at Signe, at Romanin, at Avignon. Love verses were sung before these courts, love causes were heard with mock legal formalities, and judgments delivered with formal citations of precedents. These courts had also a code, said to have been established by the king of love, and found by a Breton knight and lover in King Arthur's court tied to the foot of a falcon. Most noticeable in the decisions of these Courts of Love is the care taken by the ladies to divide their jest from earnest. The very first law of the code was that marriage does not excuse from ìove; and the interpretation of the ladies' courts laid down that love and marriage are things wholly different. Sometimes the playful singing of a lady's praise, the jest of love which was sharply distinguished from all serious suit for marriage, did become serious. One case before the courts was that of a knight, A, who had sought from a lady leave to love after the playful fashion, and had been told by her that she had already a lover, B, but that she would willingly take A whenever B was lost to her. In her case the jest became earnest, and she married B. Then immediately A claimed his right to be her lover, according to her promise. She wished to withdraw from this kind of amusement, but was sued before Queen Eleanor's Court of Love, which decided in the prosecutor's favour, saying, "We do not venture to contradict the decision of the Countess of Champagne, who, by a solemn judgment, has pronounced that true love cannot exist between those who are married to each other." But the nature of women does not change with the centuries; and it is not possible that in these playful decisions, courts consisting of ten, twelve, or fourteen ladies of chief rank in a district meant to disgrace their sex. They meant the reverse. The love discussed in their courts and sung to them by the troubadours was idle amusement only; and they took care that no lady who was chosen as the object of a rhymer's love verses should, therefore, be regarded as the object of his serious suit. If the suit was serious that was a private matter, and so was the relation between husband and wife. The distinction was made mockingly, but very firmly; and the consequence was that the poet always addressed his public exercises on the theme of love TO A.D. 1324] LOVE POEMS 85 to some lady whom he had no thought whatever of marrying. The lady, who was often a married lady, looked upon her place in his verse simply as that of one who had received the high compliment of a dedication. No poet amused the public with his suit to the woman whom he sought to marry, or said to his own wife in his verses what it became him to say only in his home. Thus the ladies enjoyed the polite entertainment of love poetry, and kept it free from risk of compromising them before the world. The southern poets had taken from the Arabs their belief that love is the essential theme of song. Only love poems were knightly, chevaleresques; all others, even those of religion, were "sirventes," songs for squires. Thus it became an exercise of ingenuity to express the sentiment of love with all possible variety. After Peter de Vinea had, in our Henry III.'s time, invented what we now know as the sonnet, that form of poem became especially devoted to the use of those who exercised their ingenuity in expressing all phases of love: love in its first emotions; love, happy, jealous; the loved one walking, sitting, sleeping; in health, in sickness, dead; the lover in despair. Long sequences of sonnets so designed, or still more artificially ingenious in their way, had become common in the time of Dante's youth, and for many generations afterwards were written on this plan. There was so little call for real and earnest thought in such love-singing, that men of rank who had no poetry in their souls learnt to arrange the conventional ideas into musical word patterns. Henry VI., the son of Barbarossa, and the father of Frederick II., at whose Sicilian court, the spirit of song was fostered, this Henry VI. was a famous troubadour, and he gouged out women's eyes when, in 1194, he kept cruel Christmas at Palermo. The character of this form of literature is also indicated by the edict of Clementina Isaure, Countess of Toulouse, who in 1324 instituted what were called the Floral Games. These games assembled at Toulouse the poets of France, and housed them in artificial arbours dressed with flowers. A violet in gold was the reward for the best poem, and the degree of Doctor was conferred on any one who was three times a prizeman. During more than thirty years of the reign of Henry III. literature was being fostered at the Apulian Court of Frederick II. Frederick cared little for pope or Church, or for crusading: but when he found it worth his while to go to Jerusalem, where |