of keen ill-will among the lawyers, and of jealousy or opposition on the part of the crown. But they seem to have had this good effect, if no other—that their rivalry stimulated the lawyers to polish, digest, and present in a rational and consistent form, the ancient common law of the land, which otherwise could not have stood its ground against its twin foreign rivals. Hence arose, near the end of the twelfth century, the work of chief justiciary Ranulf de Glanville, On the Laws and Customs of England,' the earliest extant treatise upon English law.

The chief seat of medical science during this period was the University of Salerno in Italy. This university was in existence before the time of Charlemagne, who founded a college in it. It was known as 'the city or commonwealth of Hippocrates' (civitas Hippocratica), and was at the zenith of its reputation in the twelfth century; early in which the Schola Salernitana, a learned poem in leonine, or rhyming Latin verses, on the mode of preserving health, was composed and published. In 1225 the University received from the Emperor, Frederick II., the exclusive right of granting medical degrees in his dominions. Like all other sciences at this period, medicine was greatly indebted to the researches of the Arabians, for profiting by which, Salerno, from its position on the Mediterranean, was singularly well fitted.

John of Salisbury, born about 1120, passed fifteen years of his youth and manhood, between 1136 and 1151, in studying and teaching in France. In the latter year he was made secretary to Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury, and continued to hold the same office under Thomas à Becket, whose violent death he is said to have narrowly escaped sharing. In 1176 he was appointed bishop of Chartres, where he died in 1180. His works are miscellaneous in their contents, and seem to proceed upon no well-defined

1 Tractatus de Legibus et Consuetudinibus regni Angliæ.

general plan. The Polycraticus de Nugis Curialium et Vestigiis Philosophorum was completed in 1156. The 'frivolities of the courtiers,' by which he means all that Bunyan would describe as merchandise in the markets of the city of Vanity, are examined and censured with a prolix seriousness which is more edifying than entertaining. By the footsteps of the philosophers' are meant those philosophical doctrines which were worthy to be generally received and followed. A treatise in Latin elegiacs, entitled Entheticus de Dogmate Philosophorum, has much the same argument as the Polycraticus. The Metalogicus, composed about 1160, is a prose treatise in six books, and, according to Mr. Wright, contains valuable materials for the history of scholastic philosophy during the twelfth century, and furnishes portraits of the leaders of the different sects by one who had lived and studied in their society.'

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Walter Map, archdeacon of Oxford, whose Latin poems we shall consider presently, wrote also a book De Nugis Curialium, edited by Mr. Wright for the Camden Society in 1850. This is a very miscellaneous, but also a very amusing book, being full of interesting allusions to contemporary events, manners, and persons.

Science.

Here, too, but for the name of one great Englishman, there would be nothing to detain us long. We have seen how astronomy, and the subsidiary sciences of arithmetic and geometry, were included in the old Quadrivium, the course of study which had struggled down from the Roman Empire. The reason of this lay in the absolute necessity of the thing; for without some degree of astronomical knowledge the calendar could not be computed, and the very church feasts could not be fixed to their proper dates. Moreover, the ignis fatuus of astrology

the delusive belief that human events were influenced by the aspects and conjunctions of the heavenly bodies-led on the student, duped for the benefit of his race, to a more careful study of the phenomena of the heavens than he would otherwise have bestowed. But, besides these longestablished studies, scientific teaching in other branches had been ardently commenced in France by Gerbert, as we have seen, early in the eleventh century. But in spite of the intrinsic attractiveness of such studies, they languished and dwindled away. One cause of this is to be found in the suspicion and dislike with which they were popularly regarded. Gerbert was believed to have been a magician, and to have sold his soul to the evil one. Roger Bacon was popularly regarded in England as a sorcerer down to the reign of James I. To trace this feeling to its sources would be a very curious inquiry, but it is one foreign to our present purpose. The second principal cause of this scientific sterility lay in the superior attractiveness of scholasticism. It was pleasanter to be disputatious than to be thoughtful; easier to gain a victory in dialectics than to solve a problem in mechanics. Moreover, men could not distinguish between the applicability of the scholastic method to a subject, such as theology, in which the postulates or first principles were fixed, and its applicability to subjects of which the postulates either had to be discovered, or were liable to progressive change. They tried nature, not by an appeal to facts, but by certain physical or metaphysical canons which they supposed to be impregnable. Thus Roger Bacon says that it was the general belief in his time that hot water exposed to a low temperature in a vessel would freeze sooner than the same quantity of cold water, because, say the metaphysicians, contrarium excitatur per contrarium-contraries reciprocally produce each other. 'But I have tried it,' he says, with amusing earnestness, and it is not the fact, but the very reverse.' It thus happened that Roger

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Bacon, one of the most profound and penetrating thinkers that ever existed, had no disciples, and left no school behind him. This great anticipator of modern science only serves as a gauge whereby to test the depth and strength of the medieval intellect; the circumstances of the time did not permit the seed which he cast abroad to fructify.

But few particulars are known of his life. He was born at Ilchester, in Somersetshire, in 1214; received his education at the universities of Oxford and Paris; and, after taking the Franciscan habit, commenced a long life of unbroken study at Oxford. Among his numerous works the most important is the Opus Majus, which he dedicated and presented in 1267 to Clement IV. This high-minded and enlightened Pope he had known when formerly, as Guido, Bishop of Sabina, he had visited England in the capacity of Legate. Clamours and accusations were already beginning to be raised against him, for dabbling in unlawful arts; but the Pope promised him his protection, and kept his word. But after the death of Clement the efforts to silence him were renewed, and at a chapter of Franciscans held at Paris, his writings were condemned, and he himself was placed in confinement. For ten years, dating from 1278, he remained a prisoner, and was liberated at last owing to the intercession of some English noblemen with the Pope. He died, according to Anthony Wood, in 1292.

The Opus Majus is an investigation of what he calls 'the roots of wisdom.' The introductory portion discusses at great length, and with masterly handling, the relations between philosophy and religion. Then he treats of grammatica, or the study of languages, the first and not the least essential of the roots of wisdom, since from these [languages] the sciences of the Latins have been translated.' ByLatins' he means literary men in general, to whom the Latin language was then the medium of thought in all subjects except poetry. Nay, the Latins' threat

ened at one time, as we shall see, to engross even the field of poetry. The second 'root' is mathematical science, the key, as he justly says, to all other sciences, the neglect of which now, for these thirty or forty years, has vitiated all the studies of the Latins; for whoever is ignorant of it cannot know the rest of the sciences.' Metaphysical disputation, as we have seen, had proved more exciting and attractive. To this part of the work is appended a long geographical treatise, followed by an account of the planets and their influences, which shows that on this point Bacon had succumbed to the solemn nonsense of the Arabian astrologers. The third root is perspectiva, or optics, a study to which Bacon had especially devoted himself. The fourth is experimental science, a source of knowledge which, he says, by the common herd of students is utterly ignored.' The whole work is remarkably characterised by that spirit of system in which later English philosophers have been singularly deficient. The study of each of these roots of wisdom' is recommended, not for its own sake, not for mere intellectual improvement, but on account of the relation which it bears to, and the light which it is able to throw on, the supreme science, Theology. The reasoning is sometimes singular: the study of optics, for instance, is stated to be essential to the right understanding of Holy Scripture, because in such passages as Guard us, Lord, as the apple of an eye,' we cannot fully enter into the meaning of the inspired writer, unless we have learned from this science how, and with what a multiplicity of precautions, the apple of the eye is secured from injury.

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Means of Education.

We have now to inquire what were the principal means of education which students had at their command during this period. The most important among these were the