BERKELEY LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Columbia IhtftcrgttP * ^ German (ftoaturaai MEMOIRS OP EMINENT TEACHERS AND EDUCATORS WITH CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION GERMANY REPUBLISHED PROM THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATION. EDITED BY HENRY BARNARD, LL. D. REVISED EDITION. HARTFORD: BROWN & GROSS. 1878. LIB. y HViXHDRAWN FROM BARNARD COLLEOE THE ELLA WEED LIBRARY .4 PREFACE. THE following volume is a reproduction of the Treatise printed in 1863, under the title of German Educational Reformers, with omissions and additions to make the treatment more special and comprehensive of the great teachers, educators, and organizers of school systems in Germany, from the sixth to the nineteenth century. The omissions are the chapters on Bacon, Locke, Montaigne, Rousseau, and Pestalozzi, and their influence on German education, which will now be found in the separate treatises on English, French, and Swiss Pedagogy. The additions include memoirs of the early Christian Teachers and Founders of Schools, prior to the fourteenth century, and the Organizers of Public Elementary Schools, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centu- ries, with a summary view of the present Systems and Statistics of Public Instruction in the German States. HENRY BARNARD. Hartford, March 1, 1878. 672 GERMAN EDUCATIONAL BIOGRAPHY : Memoirs of Founders and Teach- ers, Organizers, and Reformers of Systems, Institutions and Methods of Instruction in Germany, from the 7th to the 19th century. Republished from The American Journal of Education: HENRY BARNARD, LL.D., Editor. Revised Edition. Hartford: Brown & Gross. 672 pages. $3.50. CONTENTS. PAGE. I. EARLY CHRISTIAN TEACHERS, from 696 to 1300 1-40 WlLIBRORD AND WlNIFRED AT UTRECHT WlNFRED (ST. BONIFACE) AT FULDA.. 1 CHARLEMAGNE AND ALCUIN SEMINARIES CLOISTER AND GRAMMAR SCHOOLS.. 5 FULDA, HATTO AND RABANUS LUPUS OF FERRIERES HAMO ^, 11 PASCHASIUS OF OLD CORBY ANSCHARIUS OF NEW CORBY 10 BRUNO OF COLOGNE DITMAR BOPPO AND WOLFGANG OF WURTZBURG 20 UDALRIC OF AUGSBURG BERNWARD OF HILDESHEIM TANGMAR 22 BENNON OF MISNIA MEINWERC OF PADERBORN ADALBERT OF PRAGUE 24 OTHLONUS OF ST. EMMERAN WILLIAM OF HIRSCHAU 26 M ARiANrs ALBERT THE GRSAT *F OO^OGNE 30 II. HIERONYMIAN3 OR BRETHREN OF THF COMMON LIFE, from 1340 to 1500. 41-64 orlRARD GROOTK JOHN COLE FLORENTJ'JS RADEW1N 41 C.ERARD ZERBOLT THOMAS-A-KEMP*S FKNRY DE MESMES 46 JOHN WESSEL TEA.CHER o? GRZEF ^sf> HEBREW GOSWIN OF HARLON 50 3.UDOI.F AGRT.COL.:. TEACHER AT HEIDELBERG METHODS OF STUDY 53 /t'Er.ANDER HEGIUS AT WfiSSEL, EMMERICH, AND DfiVENTER 59 MURMELLIUS AT MUNSTER, AND ALCMAR, CjESARIUS, CODENIUS, HORLENIUS.. 60 RUDOLF LANGE AT MUNSTER HERMANN BUSCH AT WESSEL. 62 III. ERASMUS AND HIS EDUCATIONAL WORK, 1467 to 1536 65-80 MEMOIR SERVICE TO CLASSICAL AND BIBLICAL LEARNING 79 IV. REUCHLIN AND THE SCHLETTSTADT SCHOOL, 1360 81-92 SCHLETTSTADT SCHOOL AND ITS FIRST RECTOR, DRINGENBERG 81 JACOB WINPHELING RECTOR AT HEIDELBERG TEACHER AT STRASBURG 82 JOHN REUCHLIN SERVICES TO GREEK AND HEBREW STUDIES 84 V. RETROSPECT OF 15TH & 16TH CENTURIES 91 OLD AND NEW STUDIES MEDI/EVAL AND NEW SCHOOL BOOKS 91 VI. MARTIN LUTHER AND HIS EDUCATIONAL WORK 97-160 i. EDUCATION CONDITION OF THE TRIVIAL SCHOOLS 101 MONASTIC SCHOOL AT MAGDEBURG LATIN SCHOOL AT EISENACH 109 UNIVERSITY OF ERFURT PROFESSOR AT WITTENBERG 119 n. VIEWS OF EDUCATION AND SCHOOLS 131 HOME GOVERNMENT DOMESTIC TRAINING PARENTAL DUTY 131 SCHOOLS ADDRESS TO THE TOWN COUNCILS OF GERMANY UNIVERSITIES.... 139 in. SCHOOL ORGANIZATIONS OF BUGENHAGEN UNDER LUTHER'S DIRECTION 160 VII. PHILIP MELANCTHON AND HIS EDUCATIONAL WORK 161-184 i. EDUCATION AT PSFORSHEIM, HEIDELBERG, AND TUBINGEN 161 n. ACTIVITY AT WITTENBERG SCHOOL PLAN FOR THURINGIA 169 m. MANUALS OF GRAMMAR, LOGIC, RHETORIC, PHYSICS, ETHICS 175 GERMAN TEACHERS CONTENTS. PAGE. VIII. FOUNDERS OF SCHOOLS AND METHODOLOGY IN 16TH CENTURY.. .. 185-266 i. VALENTINE FRIKDLAND TROTZENDORF, 1490-1556 185 RECTOR OF THK GOLDBERG SCHOOL 185 ii JOHN STURM, 1507-1589 193 RECTOR OF GYMNASIUM AT STRASBUKG 193 SYSTEM OF INSTRUCTION IN DETAIL 195 in. MICHAEL NEANDER, 1525-1595 225 RECTOR OF THE CLOISTER SCHOOL AT ILFELD 226 iv. THE JESUITS AND THEIR SCHOOLS 229 LOYOLA CONSTITUTIONS RESPECTING INSTRUCTION 229 IX. INFLUENCE OF LUTHER'S ECCLESIASTICAL REVOLUTION 267-272 SCHOOLS AS THEY WERE UNIVERSITIES EARLY SCHOOL CODES 267 1 X. EDUCATIONAL REFORMERS OF THE I7TH & 18TH CENTURIES 273-352 i. WOLFGANG RATICH, 1571-1635 319 EDUCATIONAL WORK 324 n. JOHN AMOS COMENIUS, 1592-1635 347 LABORS IN GERMANY, HOLLAND, SWEDEN, AND ENGLAND 349 PEDAGOGICAL PUBLICATIONS STUDIES GRADES OF SCHOOLS 354 in. DUKE ERNEST THE Pious, 1643-1675 389 THE SCHOOL METHOD COMMON SCHOOLS OF GOTHA 389 iv. AUGUSTUS HKRMAN FRANKE, AND THE PIETISTS 1663-1727 407 ORIGIN OF TEACHERS' SEMINARIES 418 v. JOHN JULIUS HECKER, AND REALISTIC INSTRUCTION, 1739-1797 431 TECHNOLOGICAL INSTITUTIONS 445 vi. JOHN BERNHARD BASEDOW, 1723-1780 457 BASEDOW AND PESTALOZZI COMPARED 491 vii. EBERHARD VON ROCHOW, 1734-1805 491 vin. DEVELOPMENT OF PRIMARY SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS' SEMINARIES 500 XI REFORMATORY PHILOLOGISTS 521-578 i. JOHN MATHER GESNER, 1691-1761 521 ii. JOHN AUGUST ERNESTI, 1707-1781 530 in. JOHN GEORGE HAMANN, 1730-1888 533 iv. JOHN GOTFRIED HERDER, 1744-1803 557 v. FREDERICK AUGUST WOLF, 1759-1824 561 vi. CHRISTIAN GOTTLOB HEYNE, 1729-1812 574 XII. ORGANIZERS OF ELEMENTARY INSTRUCTION 579-624 i. FREDERIC II., SCHOOL REFORMS IN PRUSSIA 579 1. GENERAL REGULATIONS OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS, 1763 593 2. REGULATIONS OF THE CATHOLIC SCHOOLS OF SILESIA, 1764 609 ii. MARIA THERESA AND SCHOOL REFORMS IN AUSTRIA 613 1. HIGHER AND SECONDARY SCHOOLS, 1763 615 2. GENERAL LAW FOR THE SCHOOLS OF AUSTRIA, 1774 619 XIII. RESULTS GERMAN SYSTEMS OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION (J41-672 i. ELEMENTARY INSTRUCTION ' 641 ii. SECONDARY INSTRUCTION 651 in SUPERIOR INSTRU< TION 655 iv. SPECIAL AND PROFESSIONAL INSTRUCTION 659 INDEX... 673 EARLY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS. WILIBRORD WINFRED. ABOUT the year 664, an English piiest named Egbert, who had been taught at Lindisfarne by Bishop Colrnan, was studying in the monastery of Rathmelsigi, in Connaught, Ireland, formed the pur- pose of planting Christian institutions in Friesland, and after seven ineffectual attempts, inspired Wilibrord, who, with twelve com- panions, proceeded there, and as bishop of Utrecht, founded a school about 696, to which he afterwards sent thirty young Danes. . He was joined for a time by Winfred, ' the philosopher of Christ,' but who subsequently extended his labors into Hesse and Thuringia. Winfred was born in Devonshire, near the border lands' of English Saxony, about the year 766. He studied at Exeter, and subse- quently in the school of Nutscell in Hampshire, under the direction of Abbot Winbert. Of this school he became scholasticus, and his teaching of grammar, poetry, and the sacred sciences, drew stu- dents from all the southern provinces. But his zeal to preach the Gospel among the races of Germany, from whom he was descended, took him even to Utrecht. In one of his journeys he stopped at Treves, and attached to him a grandson of the daughter of King Dagobert, Gregory by name, a boy of fifteen years, who after- wards became bishop of Utrecht, on the death of Wilibrord, and founded the Episcopal seminary of that place. Of this school Luidger, the son of a Friesland noble, was an alumnus. He after- wards studied in the English school of York, then under Alcuin. When the latter became fixed at the court of Charlemagne, he re- commended Luidger for the first bishop of Mimigardford, which he caused to be changed to Minster, or Munster, and where he founded a monastery and episcopal school, in which he deposited the books he had brought with him from England. WINFRID AS ST. BONIFACE. Winfred, after pursuing his apostolic career along the banks of the Rhine and the Danube, was summoned to Rome, and there consecrated bishop of the German nation, and took the name of Boniface. He applied to the bishops and abbots of England for 2 EARLY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. assistance, and was joined by a band of missioners, among whom was Burchard, Lullus, Wilibald, and Winibald, who formed a com- munity, wherever they labored. In addition to the church and epis- copal schools at Utrecht, Treves, Ordorp, Munster, &c., Boniface established schools at Fritislar and Fulda (in 744), and just before his violent death, he wrote to King Pepin, asking protection for such of his disciples as were engaged in the work of educating (magistic infanticum), as they were principally foreigners. In 748 Boniface established several congregations of ladies under the aus- pices of English women, who devoted themselves to the education of girls Lioba at Bischoffsheim, and Walburga at Hildesheim. In 747, the Council of Cloveshoe was held, at the instigation of Boniface, who had then received the pallium from the hands of Pope Gregory III., together with the authority of Papal Legate and Vicar over the bishops of France and Germany his own seal being at Mentz, and his jurisdiction as archbishop extending from Utrecht to the Rhetian Alps. In this council, whose proceedings were inspired by the archbishop of Mentz, there was much action touching on schools and instruction. Bishops, abbots, and abbesses, must diligently see that all their people learn to read, and that boys are brought up so as to be useful to the church of God, and are not overworked in bodily labors. Sunday was to be strictly observed as a day of freedom {freolsunff), even for the serfs, lasting from noontide on Saturday to the dawn of light on Monday morn- ing. In church schools every one must learn the psalter by heart, and the .chant must conform exactly to the custom of the Roman church. Mass priests must always have a school of learners, for which they shall make no demand of any thing from their parents, beyond what they may give of their own will. This decree was first issued in the Council of Vaison in 529, and was re-enacted in the same words at Orleans and at Vercilli. Boniface was cruelly slaughtered at Dokkum, in East Friesland, but his body was res- cued, and borne to Mentz, and afterwards to Fulda, where, in a crypt still preserved in the chapel of the monastery founded by him, his ashes have reposed undisturbed in the revolutions of a thousand years. PEPTN AND CHARLEMAGNE. Pepin extended his protection to the schools and teachers which Boniface had established in Germany. After his death in 768, and his son Carleman in 771, Charlemagne became master of all the Frankish territories, and extended the boundaries of his empire from the shores of the Baltic to the banks of the Elsa, and from the Danube to the Atlantic Ocean. DEVELOPMENT OF SUPERIOR INSTRUCTION. ^ CIVILIZATION AND EDUCATION IN THE BRITISH ISLES. High up in the North, above the continent of Europe, lay two sister islands, a.mple in size, happy in soil and climate, and. beautiful in the face of the coun- try. Alas ! that the passions of man should alienate from one another, those whom nature and religion had bound together ! So far away were they from foreign foes, that one of them the barbarians had never reached, and though a solitary wave of their invasion has passed over the other, it was not destined to be followed by a second for some centuries. In those days the larger of the two was called Britannia, the lesser Hiberuia. The latter was early the seat of a flourishing church, abounding in the fruits of sanctity, learning, and zeal; the former, at least its southern half, had formed part of the Empire, had par- taken both of its civilization and its Christianity, but had lately been occupied, with the extermination of its population, by the right wing of the great bar- baric host which was overrunning Europe. "During the sixth and seventh centuries," says Dr. Dollinger, " the Church of Ireland stood in the full beauty of its bloom. The spirit of the gospel ope- rated amongst the people with a vigorous and vivifying power ; troops of holy men, from the highest to the lowest ranks of society, obeyed the counsel of Christ, and forsook all things, that they might follow Him. There was not a country of the world, during this period, which could boast of pious founda- tions or of religious communities equal to those that adorned this far distant island. Among the Irish, the doctrines of the Christian Religion were pre- served pure and entire ; the names of heresy or of schism were not known to them; and in the Bishop of Rome they acknowledged and venerated the Su- preme Head of the Church on earth, and continued with him, and through him with the whole Church, in a never interrupted communion. The schools in the Irish cloisters were at this time the most celebrated in all the West; and in ad- dition to those which have been already mentioned, there flourished the Schools of St. Finiari of Clonard, founded in 530, and those of Cataldus, founded in 640. Whilst almost the whole of Europe was desolated by war, peaceful Ire- land, free from the invasions of external foes, opened to the lovers of learning and piety a welcome asylum. The strangers, who visited the island, not only from the neighboring shores of Britain, but also from the most remote nations of the Continent, received from the Irish people the most hospitable reception, a gratuitous entertainment, free instruction, and even the books that were nec- essary for their studies. Thus in the year 536, in the time of St. Senanus, there arrived at Cork, from the Continent, fifteen monks, who were led thither by their desire to perfect themselves in the practices of an ascetic life under Irish directors, and to study the Sacred Scriptures in the school established near that city. At a later period, after the year 650, the Anglo-Saxons in par- ticular passed over to Ireland in great numbers for the same laudable purposes. On the other hand, many holy and learned Irishmen left their own country to proclaim the faith, to establish or to reform monasteries in distant lands, and thus to become the benefactors of almost every nation in Europe." Such was St. Columba, who is the Apostle of the Northern Picts in the sixth century ; such St. Fridolin in the beginning of the same century, who, after long labors in France, established himself on the Rhine ; such the far-famed Columbanus, who, at its end, was sent with twelve of his brethren to preach in France, Burgundy, Switzerland, and Lombardy, where he died. All these 4 DEVELOPMENT OF SUPERIOR INSTRUCTION. great acts and encouraging events had taken place, ere yet the Anglo-Saxon race was converted to the faith, or at least while it was still under education for its own part in extending it ; and thus in the contemporary or previous la- bors of the Irish, the Pope found an encouragement, as time went on, boldly to prosecute that conversion and education of the English, which was begin- ning with such good promise, in the labors of the Irish missionaries. " The foundation of many English sees," says Dollinger, " is due to Irish men ; the Northumbrian diocese was for many years governed by them, and the abbey of Lindisfarne, which was peopled by Irish monks and their Saxon dis- ciples, spread far around it its all-blessing influence. These holy men served God and not the world ; they possessed neither gold nor silver, and all that they received from the rich, passed through their hands into the hands of the poor. Kings and nobles visited them from time to time, only to pray in their churches, or to listen to their sermons ; and as long as they remained in the cloisters, they were content with the humble food of the brethren. Wherever one of these ecclesiastics or monks came, he was received by all with joy ; and whenever he was seen journeying across the country, the people streamed around him to implore his benediction and to hearken to his words. The priests entered the villages only to preach or to administer the sacraments; and so free were they from avarice, that it was only when compelled by the rich and noble, that they would accept lands for the erection of monasteries. Thus has Bede described the Irish bishops, priests, and monks of Northumbria, al- though so displeased with their custom of celebrating Easter. Many Anglo- Saxons passed over to Ireland, where they received a most hospitable recep- tion in the monasteries and schools. In crowds, numerous as bees, as Aldhelm writes, the English went to Ireland, or the Irish visited P]ngland, where the Archbishop Theodore was surrounded by Irish scholars. Of the most cele- brated Anglo-Saxon scholars and saints, many had studied in Ireland ; among these were St. Egbert, the author of the first Anglo-Saxon mission to the pagan continent, and the blessed Willebrod, the Apostle of the Frieslanders, who had resided twelve years in Ireland. From the same abode of virtue and of learn- ing, came forth two English priests, both named Ewald, who in 690, went as messengers of the gospel to the German Saxons, and received from them the crown of martyrdom. An Irishman, Mailduf, founded, in the year 670, a school, which afterwards grew into the famed Abbey of Malmesbury ; among his scholars was St. Aldhelm, afterwards Abbot of Malmesbury, and first bishop of Sherburne or Salisbury, and whom, after two centuries, Alfred pronounced to be the best of the Anglo-Saxon poets." The seventh and eighth centuries are the glory of the Anglo-Saxon Church, as are the sixth and seventh of the Irish. As the Irish missionaries traveled down through England, France, and Switzerland, to lower Italy, and attempted Germany at the peril of their lives, converting the barbarian, restoring the lapsed, encouraging the desolate, collecting the scattered, and founding churches, schools, and. monasteries, as they went along; so, amid the deep pagan woods of Germany and round about, the English Benedictine plied his axe and drove his plough, planted his rude dwelling, and raised his rustic altar upon the ruins of idolatry, and then settling down as a colonist upon the soil, began to sing his chants and to copy his old volumes, and thus to lay the slow but sure foundations of the new civilization. DEVELOPMENT OF SUPERIOR INSTRUCTION. SCHOOLS OF CHARLEMAGNE.* When Charlemagne arose upon the Continent, the special mission of the two islands was at an end ; and accordingly Ragnor Lodbrog with his Danes then began his descents upon their coasts. Yet they were not superseded, till they had formally handed over the tradition of learning to the schools of France, and had written their immortal names on one and the same page of history. The Anglo-Saxon Alcuin was the first Rector, and the Irish Clement the second, of the Studium of Paris. In the same age the Irish John was sent to found the school of Pavia ; and, when the heretical Claudius of Turin exulted over the ignorance of the devastated Churches of the Continent, and called the Synod of Bishops, who summoned him, "a congregation of asses," it was no other than the Irish Dungall, who met and overthrew the presumptuous railer. * * * Under Charlemagne, secular teaching was united to sacred, and the Church, which had before hardly recognized the education of the laity, but confined itself mainly to the clergy arid their ecclesiastical education, took supervision of both, of lay students and of profane learning. Charlemagne indeed betook himself to the two Islands of the North for a tradition ; Alcuin, an Englishman, was at the head of his educational establishments; he came to France, not with sacred learn- ing only, but with profane ; he set up schools for laity as well as clergy ; but whence was it that he in turn got the tradition which he brought ? His his- tory takes us back to that earlier age, when Theodore of Tarsus, Primate of England, brought with him thither from Rome the classics, and made Greek and Latin as familiar to the Anglo-Saxons as their native tongue. Alcuin was the scholar of Bede and Egbert ; Egbert was educated in the York school of Theodore, and Bede in that of Benedict Biscop and of John precentor of the Vatican Basilica. Here was the germ of the new civilization of Europe, which was to join together what man had divided, to adjust the claims of Reason and of Revelation, and to fit men for this world while it trained them for another. Charlemagne has the glory of commencing this noble work; and, whether his school at Paris be called a University or not, he laid down principles of which a University is the result, in that he aimed at educating all classes, and under- took all subjects of teaching. In the first place, however, he turned his attention to the Episcopal Semi- naries, which seem to have been institutions of the earliest times of Chris- tianity, though they had been in great measure interrupted amid the dissolution of society consequent upon the barbarian inroads, as various passages in these Essays have already suggested. His restoration lasted for four centuries, till Universities rose in their turn, and indirectly interfered with the efficiency of the Seminaries, by absorbing them into the larger institution. This inconve- nience was set right at a later period by the Council of Trent, whose wise regu- lations were in turn the objects of the jealousy of the Josephism of the last century, which used or rather abused the University system to their prejudice. The present policy of the Church in most places has been to return to the model both of the first ages and of Charlemagne. To these Seminaries he added, what I have spoken of as his characteristic in- stitution, grammar and public schools, as preparatory both to the Seminaries * NEWMAN'S Rise and Progress of Universities. Schools of Charlemagne. 6 DEVELOPMENT OF SUPERIOR INSTRUCTION. and to secular professions. Not that they were confined to grammar, for they recognized the trivium and quadrivium ; but grammar, in the sense of litera- ture, seems to have been the principle subject of their teaching. These schools were established in connection with the Cathedral or the Cloister ; and they re- ceived ecclesiastics and the sons of the nobility, though not to the exclusion of the poorer class. Charlemagne probably did not do much more than this ; though it was once the custom to represent him as the actual founder of the University of Paris. But great creations are not perfected in a day ; without doing every thing which had to be done, he did many things, and opened the way for more. It will throw light upon his position in the history of Christian education, to quote a passage from the elaborate work of Bulasus, on the University of Paris, though he not unnaturally claims the great Emperor as its founder, maintain- ing that he established, not only the grammar or public schools already men- tioned, but the higher Studia Generalia. It is observable that Charles, in seeking out masters, had in view, not merely the education of his own family, but of his subjects generally, and of all lovers of the Christian Religion ; and wished to be of service to all students and cul- tivators of the liberal arts. It is indeed certain that he sought out learned men and celebrated teachers from all parts of the world, and induced them to accept his invitation by rewards and honors, on which Alcuin lays great stress. 'I was well aware, my Lord David,' he says, 'that it has been your praise- worthy solicitude ever to love and to extol wisdom ; and to exhort all men to cultivate it, nay, to incite them by means of prizes and honors ; and out of divers parts of the world to bring together its lovers as the helpers of your good purpose ; among whom you have taken pains to secure even me, the meanest slave of that holy wisdom, from the extremes! boundaries of Britain.' It is evident hence, that Charles's intention was not to found any common sort of schools, such, that is, as would have required only a few instructors, but public schools, open to all, and 4 possessing all kinds of learning. Hence the necessity of a multiplicity of Professors, who from their number and the re- moteness of their homes might seem a formidable charge, not only to the court, or to one city, but even to his whole kingdom. Sucli is the testimony of Egin- hart, who says: 'Charles loved foreigners, and took great pains to support them ; so that their number was a real charge, not to the Palace alone, but even to the realm. Such, however, was his greatness of soul, that the burden of them was no trouble to him, because even of great inconveniences the praise of munificence is a compensation.' Charles had in mind to found two kinds of schools, less and greater. The less he placed in Bishops' palaces, canons' cloisters, monasteries, and elsewhere ; the greater, however, he established in places which were public, and suitable for public teaching ; and he intended them, not only for ecclesiastics, but for the nobility and their children, and on the other hand for poor scholars too ; in short, for every rank, class, and race. He seems to have had two institutions before his mind, when he contem- plated this object; the first of them was the ancient schools. Certainly, a man of so active and inquiring a mind as Charles, with his intercourse with learned persons and his knowledge of mankind, must have been well aware that in former ages these two kinds of schools were to be found everywhere; the one kind few in number, public, and of great reputation, possessed moreover of privileges, and planted in certain conspicuous and central sites. Such was the Alexandrian in Egypt, the Athenian in Greece ; such under the Roman em- perors, the schools of Rome, of Constantinople, of Berytus, which are known to have been attended by multitudes, and amply privileged by Theodosius, Justinian, and other princes ; whereas the other kind of schools, which were far more numerous, were to be found up and down the country, in cHies, towns, villages, and were remarkable neither in number of students nor in n**nae. The other pattern which was open to Charles was to be found in the pc- DEVELOPMENT OF SUPERIOR INSTRUCTION. 7 tice of monasteries, if it really existed there. The Benedictines, from the very beginning of their institution, had applied themselves to the profession of lite- rature, and it has been their purpose to have in their houses two kinds of school, a greater or a less, according to the size of the house ; and the greater they wished to throw open to all students, at a time when there were but few laymen at all who could teach, so that externs, seculars, laymen, as well as clerics, might be free to attend to them. However, true as it was that boys, who were there from childhood intrusted to the monks, bound themselves by no vow, but could leave when they pleased, marry, go to court, or enter the army, still a great many of the cleverest of them were led, either by the habits which they acquired from their intercourse with their teachers, or by their per- suasion, to embrace the monastic life. And thus, while the Church in conse- quence gained her most powerful supports, the State, on the other hand, was wanting in men of judgment, learning, and experience, to conduct its affairs. This led very frequently to kings choosing monks for civil administration, be- cause no others were to be found capable of undertaking it. Charles then, consulting for the common good, made literature in a certain sense secular, and transplanted it from the convents to the royal palace ; hi a word, he established in Paris a 'Universal School like that at Rome. Not that he deprived monks of the license to teach and profess, though he certainly limited it, from a clear view that that variety of sciences, human and profane, which secular academies require, is inconsistent with the profession and devotion of ascetics ; and accordingly, in conformity to the spirit of their institute, it was his wish that the lesser schools should be set up or retained in the Bishops' palaces and monasteries, while he prescribed the subjects which they were to teach. The case was different with the schools which are higher and public, which, instead of multiplying, he confined to certain central and celebrated spots, not more than to three in his whole empire Paris, and in Italy, Pavia and Bologna. But, after all, it was not in an Emperor's power, though he were Charle- magne, to carry into effect in any case, by the resources peculiar to himself, so great an idea as a University. Benefactors and patrons may supply the frame- work of a Studium Generale ; but there must be a popular interest and sym- pathy, a spontaneous cooperation of the many, the concurrence of genius, and a spreading thirst for knowlelge, if it is to live. Centuries passed before these conditions were supplied, and then at length about the year 1200 a remarkable intellectual movement took place in Christendom ; and to it must be ascribed the development of Universities, out of the public or grammar schools, which I have already described. No such movement could happen, without the rise of some deep and comprehensive philosophy ; and, when it rose, then the ex- isting Trivium and Quadrivium became the subjects, and the existing seats of learning the scene, of its victories ; and next the curiosity and enthusiasm, which it excited, attracted larger and larger numbers to places which were hitherto but local centers of education. Such a gathering of students, such a systematizing of knowledge, are the notes of a University. The increase of members and the multiplication of sciences both involved changes in the organization of the schools of Charlemagne ; and of these the increase of members came first. Hitherto there had been but one governor over the students, who were but few at the most, and came from the neighbor- hood; but now the academic body was divided into Nations, according to the part of Europe from which they joined it, and each Nation had a head of its own, under the title of Procurator or Proctor. There were traces of this di- vision, as we have seen in a former chapter, in Athens ; where the students were arranged under the names of Attic, Oriental, Arab, and Po'ntic, with a protector for each class. In like manner, in the University of Paris, there 8 DEVELOPMENT OF SUPERIOR INSTRUCT^,... were four nations, first, the French, which included the middle and south of France, Spain, Italy, and Greece; secondly, the English, which, besides the two British Islands, comprehended Germany and Scandinavia; thirdly, the Norman ; and fourthly, the Picards, who carried with them the inhabitants of Flanders and Brabant. Again, in the University of Vienna, there were also four nations, Austria, the Rhine, Hungary, and Bohemia. Oxford recognized only two Nations ; the north English, which comprehended the Scotch ; and the south English, which comprehended the Irish and Welsh. The Proctors of the Nations both governed and represented them ; the double office is still traceable, unless the recent Act of Parliament has destroyed it, in the modern constitution of Oxford, in which the two Proctors on the one hand represent the Masters of Arts in the Hebdomadal Board, and on the other have in their hands the discipline of the University. And as Nations and their Proctors arose out of the metropolitan character of a University, to which students congregated from the farthest and most various places, so are Faculties and Deans of Faculties the consequence of its encyclopaedic profession. According to the idea of the institutions of Charle- magne, each school had its own teacher, who was called Rector, or Master, In Paris, however, where the school was founded in St. Genevieve's, the Chan- cellor of that Church became the Rector, and he kept his old title of Chancellor in his new office. Elsewhere the head of the University was called Provost. However, it was not every one who would be qualified to profess even the Seven Sciences, of which the old course of instruction consisted, though the teaching was only elementary, and to become the Rector, Chancellor, or Prov- ost, of the University ; but, when these sciences became only parts of a whole system of instruction, which demanded in addition a knowledge of philosophy, scholastic theology, civil and canon law, medicine, natural history, and the Semitic languages, no one person was equal to the undertaking. The Rector fell back from the position of a teacher to that of a governor ; and the instruc- tion was divided among a board of Doctors, each of whom represented a special province in Science. This is the origin of Deans of Faculties; and, inasmuch as they undertook among themselves one of those departments of academical duty, which the Chancellor or Rector had hitherto fulfilled, they naturally be- came his Council. In some places the Proctors of the Nations were added. Thus, in Vienna the Council consisted of the Four Deans of Faculties, and the Four Proctors. As Nations preceded Faculties, we may suppose that Degrees, which are naturally connected with the latter, either did not enter into the original pro- visions of a University, or had not the same meaning as afterwards. And this seems to have been the case. At first they were only testimonials that a resi- dent was fit to take part in the public teaching of the place ; and hence, in the Oxford forms still observed, the Vice-Chancellor admits the person taking a degree to the "lectio" of certain books. Degrees would not at that time be considered mere honors or testimonials, to be enjoyed by persons who at once left the University and mixed in the world. The University would only con- fer them for its own purposes; and to its own subjects, for the sake of its own subjects. It would claim nothing for them external to its own limits ; and, if so, only used a power obviously connate with its own existence. But of course the recognition of a University by the State, not to say by other Uni- DEVELOPMENT OF SUPERIOR INSTRUCTION. 9 versities, would change the import of degree, and, since such recognition has commonly been granted from the first, degrees have seldom been only what they were in their original idea ; but the formal words by which they are de- noted, still preserve its memory. As students on taking degrees are admitted "legere et disputare," so are they called " Magistri," that is, of the schools; and " Doctors," that is, teachers, or in some places " Professors," as the let- ters S.T.P. show, used instead of D.D. I conclude by enumerating the characteristic distinctions, laid down by Bulreus, between the public or grammar schools founded by Charlemagne, and the Universities into which eventually some of them grew, or, as he would say, which Charlemagne also founded. First, he says, they differ from each other ratione disciplines. The Scholae Minores only taught the Trivium (viz., Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric,) and the Quadrivium (viz., Geometry, Astronomy, Arithmetic, and Music,) the seven liberal Arts ; whereas the Scholae Majores added Medicine, Law, and Theology. Next, ratione loci; for the Minores were man} 7 - and everywhere, but the Ma- jores only in great cities, and few in number. I have already remarked on the physical and social qualifications necessary for a place which is to become the seat of a great school of learning: Bulaeus observes, that the Muses were said to inhabit mountains, Parnassus or Helicon, spots high and healthy and se- cured against the perils of war, and that the Academy was a grove ; though of course he does not forget that the place must be accessible too, and in the high- way of the world. "That the c\iy of Paris," he says, "is ample in size, largely frequented, healthy and pleasant in site, there can be no doubt." Frederic the Second spoke the general sentiment, when he gave as a reason for establishing a University at Naples, the convenience of the sea-coast and the fertility of the soil. "We are informed by Matamorus, in his account of the Spanish Universities,* that Salamanca was but the second site of its Univer- sity, which was transferred thither from Palencia on account of the fertility of the neighborhood, and the mildness of its climate. And Mr. Prescott speaks of Alcala being chosen by Cardinal Ximenes as the site for his celebrated foundations, because " the salubrity of the air, and the sober, tranquil com- plexion of the scenery, on the beautiful borders of the Henares, seemed well suited to academic study and meditation." The third difference between the greater and lesser schools lies ratione fun- datorum. Popes, Emperors, and Kings, are the founders of Universities ; lesser authorities in Church and State are the founders of Colleges and Schools. Fourthly, ratione privikgiorum. The very notion of a University, I believe, is, that it is an institution of privilege. I think it is Bulaeus who says, " Stu- dia Generalia can not exist without privileges, any more than the body without the soul. And in this all writers on Universities agree." He reduces those privileges to two heads, " Patrocinium " and "Prsemium ;" and these, it is ob- vious, may be either of a civil or an ecclesiastical nature. There were for- merly five Universities endowed with singular privileges : those of Rome, of Paris, of Bologna, of Oxford, and of Salamanca ; but Antony a Wood quotes an author who seems to substitute Padua for Rome in this list. Lastly, the greater and lesser schools differ ratione regiminis. The head of a College is one ; but a University is a " respublica litteraria." * Hispnn. Illustr. t. p. 2, 801. 10 EARLY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. DUNGAL AND CLEMENT. Two Irish scholars, Dungal and Clement, arrived in France soon after the re- tirement of Alcuin from court who on landing excited curiosity by crying aloud, Wisdom to sell ! Who'll buy ? Charlemagne attached them both to his service Clement at Paris, where he soon was put in charge of the Palatine School, and Dungal at Pavia, where he opened a school in the monastery of St. Augustine, and in 811 addressed a letter to the emperor on the solar eclipse, which was predicted for the next year. Clemen^ seems to have been deeply imbued with the learned mysticism of the school of Toulouse, and in a treatise on the eight parts of speech, which is still preserved, quotes the rules of the grammarian Virgil, and the writings of the noble doctors Glengus, Gal- bungus, Eneas, and the rest. Alcuin complained much of the disorder intro- duced into the studies of the court school after his departure. 'I left them Latins,' he exclaimed, ' arid now I find them Egyptians.' This was a double hit at the gibberish of the twelve Latiuites, which Alcuin could not abide, and at the hankering which the Irish professors always displayed, both in science and theology, for the teaching of the school of Alexandria, many of them hav- ing embraced the peculiar views of the Neo-Platonists. The Egyptians, how- ever, found a welcome at the court of Charlemagne in spite of their eccen- tricities ; for there no one was ever coldly received who could calculate eclipses, or charm the ears of the learned monarch with Latin hexameters. And it is perhaps to one of these Irish professors that we must attribute those verses preserved by Martene, and professing to be written by an ' Irish exile,' which contain such agreeable flattery of the Frankish sovereign and of his people, and which were presented to the emperor as he held one of those solemn New-year courts, at which his subjects vied one with another in offer- ing him jewels, tissues, horses, and bags of money. The School of the Palace declined under the management of Clement, and of his successor Claud, bishop of Turin, and during the reign of Louis le De- bonnaire. It revived under Charles the Bald, when it was much resorted to by Irish and English scholars, JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA. John Scotus Erigena, born in Ireland in 796, and educated at York and Lin- disfarne, resorted to Paris in 826, where he was placed by Charles the Bald over the Palatine school. He had early applied himself to the study of Greek, and embraced the doctrines of the Neo-Platonic school. His translation of the works of St. Denys the Arcopagite, astonished the scholars at Rome, who looked upon all beyond the Alps as barbarians. In his philosophical treatise, De Natura Rerum, he sets forth the doctrines of the Greek Platonists, and flings- defiance at his adversaries at Rome. "They are all deceived, owing to their ignorance of liberal studies. They have none of them studied Greek, and with a knowledge of the Latin language alone, it is impossible for them to un- derstand the distinctions of science." In 855, certain propositions drawn from his writings were condemned as heretical by the Council of Valence. He withdrew from the school in 865, on the remonstrance of Pope Nicholas I., on the ground of the perversion of his authority by the enemies of the church. He retired to England, where, according to some historians, he taught mathematics and astronomy at Oxford, and, to others, opened a school at Malmsbury. EARLY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 11 FULDA. HATTO AND RABANUS. The Abbey of Fulda, where the monks were organized into a community under the rule of St. Benedict, was one of the earliest to carry out the educa- tional work begun by Alcuin at Aix and Tours. Two of the younger brothers were selected to study with the great master at Tours Hatto and Rabanus, who resorted to him in 802. The name of Maurus was bestowed by Alcuin on his favorite disciple, and was afterwards retained by Rabauus in addition to his own. He studied both sacred and profane sciences, as appears from the letter he addressed many years later to his old schoolfellow, Haimo, bishop of Halberstadt, in which he reminds him of the pleasant days they had spent to- gether in studious exercises, reading, not only the Sacred books, and the ex- positions of the Fathers, but also investigating all the seven liberal arts. In 813, being then twenty-five years of age, Rabanus was recalled to Fulda, by the abbot Ratgar, and placed at the head of the school, with the strict injunc- tion that he was to follow in all things the method of his master Alcuin. The latter was still alive, and addressed a letter to the young preceptor, which is printed among his other works, and is- addressed to ' the boy Maurus,' in which he wishes him good luck with his scholars. His success was so extraordinary that the abbots of other monasteries sent their monks to study under him, and were eager -to obtain his pupils as professors in their own schools. The Ger- man nobles also gladly confided their sons to his care, and he taught them with wonderful gentleness and patience. He carried out the system which had been adopted by Alcuin of thoroughly exercising his scholars in grammar be- fore entering on the study of the other liberal arts. 'All the generations of Germany,' says Trithemius, 'are bound to celebrate the praise of Rabanus, who first taught them to articulate the sound of Greek and Latin.' At his lectures every one was trained to write equally well in prose or verse on any subject placed before him, and was afterwards taken through a course of rhetoric, logic, and natural philosophy, according to the capacities of each. Every variety of useful occupation was embraced by the monks ; while some were at work hewing down the old forest which a few years before had given shelter to the mysteries of Pagan worship, or tilling the soil on those numerous farms which to this day perpetuate the memory of the great abbey in the names of the towns and villages which have sprung up on their site, other kinds of industry were kept up within doors, where the visitor might have be- held a huge range of workshops in which cunning hands were kept constantly busy on every description of useful and ornamental work in wood, stone, and metal. It was a scene, not of artistic dileltanteism, but of earnest, honest la- bor, and the treasurer of the abbey was charged to take care that the sculp- tors, engravers, and carvers in wood, were always furnished with plenty to do. Passing on to the interior of the building the stranger would have been intro- duced to the scriptorium, over the door of which was an inscription warning the copyists to abstain from idle words, to be diligent in copying good books, and to take care not to alter the text by careless mistakes. Twelve monks al- ways sat here employed in the labor of transcription, as was also the custom at Hirsauge, a colony sent out from Fulda in 830, and the huge library which was thus gradually formed, survived till the beginning of the seventeenth cen- tury, when it was destroyed in the troubles of the thirty years' war. Not far 12 EARLY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. from the scriptorium was the interior school, where the studies were carried on with an ardor and a largeness of views, which might have been little expected from an academy of the ninth century. Our visitor, where he from the more civilized south, might well have stood in mute surprise in the midst of these fancied barbarians, whom he would have found engaged in pursuits not unwor- thy of the schools of Rome. The monk Probus is perhaps lecturing on Virgil and Cicero, and that with such hearty enthusiasm that his brother professors accuse him, in good-natured jesting, of ranking them with the saints. Else- where disputations are being carried on over the Categories of Aristotle, and an attentive ear will discover that the controversy which made such a noise in the twelfth century, and divided the philosophers of Europe into the rival x sects of the Nominalists and Realists, is perfectly well understood at Fulda, though it does not seem to have disturbed the peace of the school. To your delight, if you be not altogether wedded to the dead languages, you may find some en- gaged on the uncouth language of their fatherland, and, looking over their shoulders, you may smile to see the barbarous words which they are cataloguing in their glossaries ; words, nevertheless, destined to reappear centuries hence in the most philosophic literature of Europe. Fulda derived its scholastic tra- ditions from Alcuin and Bede, and could not neglect the vernacular. In the midst of this world of intellectual life and labor, Rabanus continued for some years to train the first minds of Germany, and counted among his pu- pils the most celebrated men of the age, such as Lupus of Ferrieres, Walafrid Strabo, and Ruthard of Hirsange, the latter of whom was the first who read profane letters to the brethren of his convent 'after the manner of Fulda.' Lupus was a monk of Ferrieres, where he had been carefully educated by the abbot Aldric, who was a pupil of Sigulf, and had acted for some time as as- sistant to Alcuin in the school of Tours. Aldric afterwards became archbishop of Sens, and sent Lupus to complete his education at Fulda, under Rabanus. Like all the scholars of Ferrieres, Lupus had a decided taste for classical litera- ture ; the love of letters had been, to use his own expression, innate in him from a child, and he was considered the best Latinist of his time. His studies at Fulda were chiefly theological, and he applied to them with great ardor, without, however, forgetting ' his dear humanities.' It would even seem that he taught them at Fulda, thus returning one benefit for another. The monas- tery was not far from that of Seligenstadt, where Eginhard, the secretary and biographer of Charlemagne, was their abbot. A friendship, based on simi- larity of tastes, sprang up between him afnd Lupus, and was maintained by a correspondence, much of which is still preserved. Lupus always reckoned Eginhard as one of his masters ; not that he directly received any lessons from him, but on account of the assistance which the abbot rendered him by the loan of valuable books. In one of his earliest letters to this good friend he begs for a copy of Cicero's ' Rhetoric,' his own being imperfect, as well as for the 'Attic Nights ' of Aulus Gellius, which were not then to be found in the Fulda library. In another letter, he consults him on the exact prosody of cer- tain Latin words, and begs him to send the proper size of the Uncial letters used in manuscripts of that century. Among the fellow-students of Lupus at this time was Walafrid Strabo, a man of very humble birth, whose precocious genius had early made him known in the world of letters. In spite of the unfortunate personal defect which EARLY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 13 earned him his surname, "Walafrid's Latin verses had gained him respect among learned men at the age of fifteen, and they are favorably noticed even by critics of our own time. He had received his early training in the monastery of Reichnau, the situation of which was well fitted to nurture a poetic genius. His masters had been Tetto and Wettin, the latter of whom was author of that terrible ' Vision of Purgatory ' which left an indelible impress on the popular devotion of Christendom. From Reichnau he was sent by his superiors to study at Fulda, where he acquired a taste for historical pursuits, and is said to have assisted in the compilation of the annals of the monastery. It was out of the Fulda library that he collected the materials for his great work, the G'oss, or Commentary on the Text of Scripture, gathered from the writings of the Fathers. It received many additions and improvements from subsequent writers, and, for more than six hundred years, continued to be the most popu- lar explanation of the Sacred text in use among theologians. Returning to Reichnau, Walafrid was appointed to the office of scholasticus, and filled it with such success as fairly to establish the reputation of that monastic school. Ermanric, one of his pupils, says of him, that to the end of his life he contin- ued to exhibit the same delightful union of learning and simplicity which had endeared him to his masters and schoolfellows. Even after he was appointed abbot, he found his chief pleasure in study, teaching, and writing verses, and would steal away from the weightier cares of his office to take a class in his old school and expound to them a passage of Yirgil. Neither old age nor busy practical duties dried up the fount of Abbot Walafrid's inspiration, and we find him in his declining years writing his poem entitled ' Hortulus,' 1 wherein he describes with charming freshness of imagery, the little garden blooming beneath the window of his cell, and the beauty and virtue of the different flowers which he loved to cultivate with his own hands. Another of the Fulda scholars contemporary with those named above, was Otfried, a monk of Weissemburg, who entered with singular ardor into the study of the Tudesque dialect. Rabanus himself devoted much attention to this subject, and composed a Latin and German glossary on the books of Scrip- ture, together with some other etymological works, among which is a curious treatise on the origin of languages. Otfried took up his master's favorite pur- suits with great warmth, and the completion of Charlemagne's German gram- mar is thought to be in reality his work, though generally assigned to Rabanus. On retiring to his own monastery, where he was charged with the direction of the school, he continued to make the improvement of his native language the chief object of his study. A noble zeal prompted him to produce something in the vernacular idiom which should take the place of those profane songs, often of heathen origin, which had hitherto been the only production of the German muse. The character of Rabanus may be gathered from that of his pupils. He was in every respect a true example of the monastic scholar, and took St. Bede for the model on which his own life was formed. All the time not taken up with religious duties he devoted to reading, teaching, writing, or ' feeding himself on the Divine Scriptures.' The best lesson he gave his scholars was the ex- ample of his own life, as Eginhard indicates in a letter written to his son, then studying as a novice at Fulda. ' I would have you apply to literary exercises,' he says, ' and try as far as you can to acquire the learning of your master, 14 EARLY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. whose lessons are so clear and solid. But specially imitate his holy life. . . . For grammar and rhetoric and all human sciences are vain and even injurious to the servants of God, unless by Divine grace they know how to follow the law of God; for science puffeth up, but charity buildeth up. I would rather see you dead than inflated with vice.' Nevertheless, the career of Rabanus was far from being one of unruffled re- pose, and the history of his troubles presents us with a singular episode in monastic annals. The abbot Ratgar was one of those men whose activity of mind and body was a cross to every one about him. He could neither rest himself nor suffer anybody else to be quiet. The ordinary routine of life at Fulda, with its prodigious amount of daily labor, both mental and physical, did not satisfy the requirements of his peculiar organization. He had a fancy for rearranging the whole discipline of the monastery, and was specially desirous of providing himself with more splendid buildings than those which had been raised by the followers of the humble Sturm. Every one knows that the pas- sion for building has in it a directly revolutionary element ; it is synonymous with a passion for upsetting, destroying, and reducing every thing to chaos. Hence, the monks of Fulda had but an uncomfortable time of it, and what was worse, Ratgar was so eager to get his fine buildings completed, that he not only compelled his monks to work as masons, but shortened their prayers and masses, and obliged them to labor on festivals. Rabanus himself could claim no exemption ; he had to exchange the pen for the trowel ; and to take away all possibility of excuse, Ratgar deprived him of his books, and even of "the private notes which he had made of Alcuin's lectures. Rabanus was too good a monk to protest against his change of employment, and carried his bricks and mortar as cheerfully as ever he had applied himself to a copy of Cicero ; but he did not conceive it. contrary to religious obedience humbly to protest against the confiscation of his papers, and attempted to soften the hard heart of his abbot with a copy of verses. The building grievance at last grew to such a pitch, that the monks in de- spair appealed to Charlemagne, who summoned Ratgar to court to answer their charges, and appointed a commission of bishops and abbots to inquire into the whole matter. Their decision allayed the discord for a time, and so long as the emperor lived, Ratgar showed his monks some consideration. But no sooner was he dead than the persecution recommenced, and Rabanus, again deprived of his books arid papers, seems to have consoled himself by making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The abbot, however, raised again such a storm that a new commission was appointed by the emperor (Louis). On its report, Rat- gar was deposed, and Eigil, a disciple of Sturm, elected in his place. Under his gentle administration the peace of the community was restored, and Raba- nus resumed his teaching, which he soon after gave up (except the Holy Scrip- tures), on becoming the successor of Eigil in 822. The notes of his oral in- struction on the chief duties of ecclesiastics and the rites of the church were afterwards revised and arranged in the Treatise De Institutione Ctericorum, an invaluable monument of the faith and practice of the Church in the ninth cen- tury. It treats in three books of the Sacraments, the Divine office, the feasts and fasts of the Church, and the learning necessary for ecclesiastics, concluding with instructions and rules for the guidance of preachers. On the last subject he observes that three things are necessary in order to become a good preacher; EARLY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 15 first, to be a good man yourself, that you may be able to teach others to be so; secondly, to be skilled in the Holy Scriptures and the interpretations of the Fathers ; thirdly, and above all, to prepare for the work of preaching by that of prayer. As to the studies proper to ecclesiastics, he distinctly requires them to be learned not only in the Scriptures, but also in the seven liberal arts, pro- vided only that these are treated as the handmaids of theology, and he explains his views on this subject much in the same way as Bede had done before him. In 847, Rabanus was raised to the archiepiscopal see of Mentz, and died in 856, leaving his books to the abbeys of Fulda, and St. Alban's of Mentz. LUPUS OF FERRIERES. Lupus became abbot of the monastery in 856, but continued to teach and labor for his school particularly in collecting a noble library. He took extra- ordinary pains in seeking for his treasures even in distant countries, in causing them to be transcribed, and sometimes in lovingly transcribing them himself. His interesting correspondence contains frequent allusions to these biblio- graphical researches. At one time he asks a friend to bring him the ' Wars of Catiline and of Jugurtha ' by Sallust, and the ' Verrines of Cicero.' At another, he writes to Pope Benedict III., begging him to send by two of his monks, about to journey to Rome, certain books which he could not obtain in his own country, and which he promises to have speedily copied and faithfully returned. They are, the 'Commentaries of St. Jerome on Jeremias,' 'Cicero de Oratore,' the twelve books of Quintilian's Institutes, and the ' Commentary of Donatus on Terence.' With all his taste for the classics, however, Lupus had too much good sense not to see the importance of cultivating the barbarous dialects, and sent his nephew with two other noble youths to Prom, to learn the Tudesque idiom. In his school he made it his chief aim to train his pupils, not only in grammar and rhetoric, but also in the higher art of a holy life. The monastic seminaries were proverbially schools of good living as well as good learning, rede faciendi d bene dicendi, as Mabillon -expresses it ; and there was nothing that Lupus had more at heart than the inculcation of this principle, that the cultivation of head and heart must go together. ' We too often seek in study,' he writes in his epistle to the monk Ebradus, 'nothing but ornament of style ; few are found who desire to acquire by its means purity of manners, which is of far greater value. We are very much afraid of vices of language, and use every effort to correct them, but we regard with indifference the vices of the heart.' His favorite Cicero had before his time lifted a warn- ing voice against the capital error of disjoining mental from moral culture, and in the Christian system of the earlier centuries they were never regarded apart. Lupus was not too great a scholar to condescend to labor for beginners, and drew up, for the benefit of his pupils, an abridgment of Roman history, in which he proposes the characters of Trajan and Theodosius for the study of Christian princes. He was wont to boast of his double descent from Alcuin, as being a pupil of Sigulf and Rabanus, both of them disciples of the great master. His own favorite scholar Heiric, or Henry of Auxerre, indulged in a similar morsel of scholastic pride. He had studied under both Lupus and Haimo of Halberstadt, the former schoolfellow of Rabanus, at St. Martin of Tours. Haimo seems to have lectured for some time at Ferrieres, and Heiric tells us in some not inelegant verses that it was the custom of the two peda- 16 EARLY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. gogues to give their pupils a very pleasant sort of recreation, relating to them whatever they had found in the course of their reading that was worthy of re- membrance, whether in Christian or Pagan authors. Heiric, who was some- what of an intellectual glutton, and had a craving for learning of all sorts and on all imaginable subjects, made for himself a little book, in which he diligently noted down every scrap that fell from the lips of his masters. This book he subsequently published, and dedicated to Hildebold, bishop of Auxerre. Heiric himself afterwards became a man of letters ; he was appointed scholas- ticus of St. Germain's of Auxerre, and was instrusted with the education of Lothaire, son of Charles the Bald, as we learn from the epistle addressed to that monarch which he prefixed to his Life of St. Germanus, in which he speaks of the young prince, recently dead, as in years a boy, but in mind a philoso- pher. Another of his pupils was the famous Remigius of Auxerre, who, to- wards the end of the ninth century, was summoned to Rheims by archbishop Fulk, to reestablish sacred studies in that city, and worked there in concert with his former schoolfellow, Hucbald of St. Amand, who attained a curious sort of reputation by his poem on bald men, each line of which began with the letter C. the whole being intended as a compliment to Charles the Bald. Fulk himself became their first pupil, and after thoroughly restoring the school of Rheims, Remigius passed on to Paris, where we shall have occasion to notice him among the teachers of the tenth century. From his time the schools of Paris continued to increase in reputation and importance till they developed into the great university which may thus be distinctly traced through a pedi- gree of learned men up to the great Alcuin himself. This genealogy of peda- gogues is of no small interest, as showing the efforts made in the worst of times to keep alive the spark of science, and the persistence with which, in spite of civil wars and Norman invasions, the scholastic traditions of Alcuin were maintained. PASCHASIUS RADPERT OP OLD CORBY. The school attached to the monastery of Corby (under Adalhard, a prince of the blood royal), was chosen by Charlemagne for the training of Saxon youth to act as missionaries on their return to their own country. The master chosen for the task of rearing these future missionaries was Paschasius Radpert, one of the most remarkable men of his time. Originally of very humble birth, he owed his education to the charity of he nuns of Soissons, who first received the desolate child into their own out-quarters, and then sent him to some monks in the same city, under whose tuition he acquired a fair amount of learning, and addicted himself to the study of Virgil, Horace, Cicero, and Ter- ence. He never forgot the kindness of his early benefactresses, and in after years dedicated his Treatise on the Virginity of the Blessed Virgin to the good nuns, styling himself therein their alumnus, or foster-son. After receiving the tonsure in early youth, Paschasius, whose tastes for Terence and Cicero rather predominated at that time over his relish for more sacred studies, abandoned his first inclination for the cloister, and lived for some years a secular life. Touched at last by divine grace, he entered the abbey of Old Corby, and there made his profession under the abbot Adalhard. All the ardor he had previously shown in the pursuit of profane literature he now applied to the study of the Divine Scriptures. Yet he only devoted to EARLY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 17 study of any kind those ' furtive hours,' as he calls them, which he was able to steal from the duties of regular discipline, and was never seen so happy as when engaged in the choral office or the meaner occupations of community life. Such, then, was the master chosen by Adalhard for the responsible office of scholasticus, and a very minute account is left us of his manner of discharg- ing its duties. Every day he delivered lectures on the sacred sciences, besides preaching to the monks on Sundays and Festivals. His thorough familiarity with the best Latin authors appears from the frequent allusions to them which occur in his writings. Quotations from the classic poets drop from his pen, as it were, half unconsciously, and we are told that he continued to keep up his acquaintance with them, so far as was necessary for teaching others. But his own study was now chiefly confined to the Holy Scriptures and the Fathers; and among the latter, his favorites were St. Augustine, St. Jerome, St. Am- brose, St. John Chrysostom, Bede, and St. Gregory the Great. 'He did not approve,' says his biographer, 'of the diligence displayed by some men of the time in explaining and meditating on profane authors. In a passage which occurs in the preface to his exposition of St. Matthew's Gospel, he blames those lovers of secular learning ' who seek various and divers expounders' that so they may attain to the understanding of beautiful lies concerning shameful things, arid who will not pass over I do not say a single page, but a single line or syllable, without thoroughly investigating it, with the utmost labor and vigilance, while at the same time they utterly neglect the Sacred Scriptures. Few were more keenly alive than he to the charms of polite literature, neither did he at all condemn its use within proper limits, even among cloistered students. It would, indeed, have been a difficult matter to have eradicated the love of the beautiful from the heart of Paschasius. He pos- sessed it in every shape, and was not merely a poet, but a musician also. In one of his writings he lets fall an observation which might be taken for a prose rendering of a verse of Shelley's, although the Christian scholar goes beyond the infidel poet, and does not merely describe the sentiment which all have felt, but traces it to its proper source. Shelley complains that Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. Paschasius explains the mystery : ' There is no song to be found without a tone of sadness in it ; even as here below there are no joys without a mixture of sorrow; for songs of pure joy belong only to the heavenly Sion, but lamentation is the property of our earthly pilgrimage.' His musical tastes were perfectly shared and understood by his master St. Adalhard, whose sensi- bility to the influence of melodious sounds is spoken of by his biographer, Gerard. Even during his residence at the court of Charlemagne, it is said of him that ' he was always so full of a sweet intention towards God, that if while assisting at the royal council he heard the sound of some chance melody, he had it not in his power to refrain from tears, for all sweet music seemed to remind him of his heavenly country.' In fact, it can not be denied that the men of the dark ages had a singular susceptibility of temperament, and that the monastic type in particular exhibited a remarkable union of strength with tenderness, of practical sense with poetic sensibility. The importance they attached to music as an essential branch of education 2 18 EARLY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. is not, however, to be attributed so much to any peculiar sensitiveness of or- ganization as to the fact that they inherited the traditions of the ancients, and with them had learned to look on music as a science intimately associated with the knowledge of divine things. They were the true descendants of those holy fathers of olden time, concerning whom the Son of Sirach tells us that ' they sought out musical tunes and published Canticles of the Scriptures, and were rich in virtue, studying beautifulness, and living at peace in their houses.' The narrative of the early English schools which counted it their chief glory to have been instructed in sacred chant by a Roman choir master, will suf- ficiently have illustrated the fact that music held a very prominent place in the system of education which held sway in the early centuries; and the theory on which this high esteem was based will nowhere be found better explained than in the writings of Rabanus. 'Musical discipline, 1 he says, 'is so noble and useful a thing, that without it no one can properly discharge the ecclesiastical office. For whatsoever in reading is correctly pronounced, and whatsoever in chanting is sweetly modulated, is regulated by a knowledge of this discipline ; and by it we nof only learn how to read and sing in the church, but also rightly perform every rite in the divine service. Moreover, the discipline of music is diffused through all the acts of our life. For when we keep the com- mandments of God, and observe His law, it is certain that our words and acts are associated by musical rhythm with the virtues of harmony. If we observe a good conversation, we prove ourselves associated with this discipline ; but when we act sinfully, we have in us no music.' ANSCHARIUS OF NEW CORBY. Anscharius was one of those chosen to colonize the monastery of New Corby, the mention of which requires a few words of explanation. The foundation of this daughter-house was the great work of St. Adalhard, who so soon as his young Saxons were sufficiently trained in learning and monastic discipline, consulted them on the possibilities of their obtaining a suitable site for a foundation in their native land. After many difficulties had been raised and overcome, ground was procured, and the building of the abbey was begun. Adalhard repaired thither to superintend operations in company with Paschasius and his own brother Wala, who, brought up like himself as a soldier and courtier, had in former years held military command in Saxon}-, and won the affections of the people by his wise and gentle rule. When the Saxons saw their old governor among them again in the monastic habit, nothing could exceed their wonder and delight ; they ran after him in crowds, looking at him, and feeling him with their hands to satisfy themselves that it was really he, paying no attention whatever to the presence of the abbot of any other of his companions. The first stone of the new abbey was laid on September 26, 822 ; Old Corby made over to the new colony all the lands held by the community in Saxony; the Emperor Louis gave them a charter, and some precious relics from his private chapel, and in a few years that great seminary was completed which was destined to carry the light of faith and science to the pagan natives of the farther north. It would be hard to say which of the two Corbies held the highest place in monastic history ; a noble emulation existed between them, each trying to outstrip the other in the per- fection of monastic discipline. New Corby, in her turn, became the mother- house of a vast number of German colonies. EARLY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS AND SCHOLARS. 19 ST. BRUNO AT COLOGNE.* ST. BRUNO was the younger brother of the Emperor, Otho the Great, and like him a pupil of Heraclius of Liege. His education began at Utrecht, where he was sent at the mature age of four to commence his studies under the good abbot Baldric. Utrecht had never entirely lost its scholastic reputation since the days of St. Gregory. Only a few years before the birth of Bruno, the see had been filled by St. Radbod, a great-grandson of that other Radbod, duke of Oriesland, who had so fiercely opposed the preaching of St. Boniface. Rad- bod the bishop, however, was a very different man from his savage ancestor ; he was not only a pious ecclesiastic, but an excellent scholar, for he had been educated in the Palatine school of Charles the Bald, under the learned Mannon, whose heart he won by his facility in writing verses, and the cares of the epis- copate never induced him altogether to neglect the Muses. Besides a great number of poems which he wrote during his residence at Utrecht, we have a Latin epigram, which he improvised at the moment of receiving the Holy Viat- icum, and which is perhaps as worthy of being preserved as the dying epigram of the Emperor Hadrian.* Esuries Te, Christe Deus, sitis atque videndi Jam moilo carnales me vetat esse dapes. Da mihi Te vesci, Te potum haurire salutis, Unicus ignota? Tu cibus esto via? ; Et quern longa fames errantem ambedit in orbe Hunc satia vultu. Patris Imngo, Tuo. In consequence of the encouragement given to learning by so many of its bishops, Utrecht became the fashionable place of education, and it had grown a sort of custom with the German sovereigns to send their sons thither at an early age. Little Bruno made rapid progress both in Greek and Latin litera- ture ; he particularly relished the works of Prudentius, which he learnt by heart ; never let himself be disturbed by his noisy companions, and took great care of his books. Indeed, the only thing that ever moved him to anger was the sight of any one negligently handling a book. His reading included some- thing of all sorts; historians, orators, poets, and philosophers nothing came amiss. He had native Greeks to instruct him in their language, and became so proficient in it as afterwards to act as interpreter for his brother to the Greek ambassador who frequented the German court. "With all this he did not neglect the sacred sciences, and a certain Isaac, a Scotch, or rather Irish -pro- fessor, who taught at Utrecht, spoke of him as not merely a scholar, but a saint. The monk Ditmar, one of his school-fellows, himself afterwards cele- brated in the literary world by his chronicle of the royal house of Saxony, bears witness to the habits of piety which adorned the very childhood of the young prince. 'Every morning,' he says, 'before he left his room to go to the school, he would be at his prayers, while the rest of us were at play.' A cer- tain tone of exaggeration is not unfrequently indulged in by early writers when extolling the subjects of their biographies as prodigies of every literary excellence, but the description left us of Bruno's intellectual achievements does not admit of being understood as mere figures of speech. His love of reading was almost a passion. He read every thing, ' even comedies,' says his bi- ographer, who seems a little scandalized at the fact, but explains that he at- tended only to the style, and neglected the matter. To complete the picture * Christian Schools and Scholars, Vol. I., p. 346. 20 EARLY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS AND SCHOLARS. of Bruno's school-days, it must be added that he was an excellent manager of his time, and always made the most of his morning hours, a good habit he re- tained through life. I will say nothing of his early career as the reformer of Lauresheim Abbey ; he was still young when his brother Otho succeeded to the throne, and at once summoned Bruno to Court, charging him with the task of erecting there a Palatine academy, after the model of that of Charlemagne. Nothing was better suited to Bruno's wishes and capacity, and he began at once to teach the entire curriculum of the liberal arts to a crowd of noble pu- pils. Whatever was most beautiful in the historians and poets of Greece or Rome, he made known to his disciples, and not content with the labor entailed on him by his own lectures, he did not allow the professors whom he chose to assist him, to commence theirs till he had previously conferred with them on the subjects they were about to explain. In 953, Bruno, in spite of his youth, was demanded by the clergy and people of Cologne for their archbishop, and being consecrated, he at once entered on a career of gigantic labors, everywhere re-establishing ecclesiastical discipline and social order throughout a province long wasted by war and barbaric inva- sions. His political position, moreover, imposed on him yet more extensive caves ; for Otho, who called him his second soul, when summoned into Italy, created his brother duke of Lorraine, and imperial lieutenant in Germany. The dukedom of Lorraine at that time included all the country from the Alps to the Moselle, which now, therefore, acknowledged Bruno as its actual sov- ereign. But these multiplied dignities and the accumulation of business which they entailed, did not quench Bruno's love of study. Whenever he traveled, whether in the visitation of his diocese, or when accompanying his brother's court, he always carried his library with him, ; as if it had been the ark of the Lord,' says the monk Rotger, who, moreover, remarks that this library was stored both with sacred and profane authors, for, like a good householder, he knew how to bring out of his treasury things new and old. Nothing ever pre- vented his finding time for reading, and he excited every one about him to cul- tivate similar tastes, specially his nephew Otho, who was for some time his pu- pil. Indeed, Rotger goes so far as to say that the archbishop felt a certain want of confidence in those who had no attraction to study; meaning probably to those unlettered clerks, who cared not to acquire the learning proper to their sacred calling. Of these there was no lack in Lorraine ; but Bruno effected a great change in the condition of that afflicted province, by appointing good bishops, healing feuds, reforming monasteries, and making men love one an- other in spite of themselves. In all these good works he was assisted by the learning and martial valor of Ansfrid, count of Lorraine, who was well read both in law and Scripture, and who used his sword exclusively to repress pil- lage, and defend the helpless. This feudal noble of the Iron Age spent all his leisure hours in study, arid when at last he embraced the ecclesiastical state, and at the entreaties of the emperor accepted a bishopric, he was able to lay his sword on the altar, and render witness that it had never been drawn in an unjust cause. BOPPO OF WURTZBURG. WOLFGANG. Bruno's example made a great stir in Germany, and moved many bishops to exert themselves in the work of reform. Boppo, bishop of Wurtzburg, sent to Rome for a celebrated master named Stephen, and with his help the episcopal EARLY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS AND SCHOLARS. 21 seminary was restored, and soon boasted of a ' crowd of students, and a great store of books.' Among other pupils educated under Master Stephen were two friends, named Wolfgang and Henry. Wolfgang was a student of Bruno's type, possessing an avidity for all sorts of learning ; and though he began his school life at seven, he is said in a few years not only to have acquired an ex- tensive acquaintance with the letter of the Scriptures, but to have penetrated into the pith and marrow of their mystical sense. His father had thought it sufficient to place him under a certain priest, to receive a very scanty ele- mentary education, but Wolfgang entreated that he might be sent to Reichenau, which then enjoyed a high reputation ; and here he first met with his friend Henry. Henry was the younger brother of Bishop Boppo, and easily per- suaded Wolfgang to migrate with him to Wurtzberg, for the sake of studying under the famous Master Stephen. It soon appeared, however, that the dis- ciple was more learned than the master, and when the Wurtzburg students found Master Stephen's lectures very dull, or very obscure, they were in the habit of applying to Wolfgang, who possessed that peculiar gift of perspicacity which marked him from his boyhood as called to the functions of teaching. Moreover, he was so kind, and so willing to impart his knowledge, that his companions declared he made daylight out of the darkest matters ; when Ste- phen's prosy abstruseness had fairly mystified them, five words from Wolfgang seemed like the Fiat lux, and these observations reaching the ears of Stephen, had the proverbial fate of all comparisons. At last, one day, when Wolfgang was surrounded by a knot of his school-fellows, who entreated him to expound a passage in Marcian Capella, Master Stephen, moved to jealous anger, forbade Wolfgang any longer to attend the lectures. This ungenerous command obliged him to continue his studies alone, but he seems to have lost little by being deprived of the benefit of an instructor, whom he had already far out- stripped in learning. Henry and Boppo were both of them relatives of Otho, who, in 956, caused the former to be raised to the archbishopric of Treves. Henry insisted on car- rying his friend with him into his new diocese, and wished to load him with benefices and honors, all of which, however, Wolfgang refused. He would ac- cept of no other employment than that of teaching youth, for which he knew his aptitude, and which he heartily loved; and, in the true spirit of a Christian teacher, he chose to discharge this office gratuitously, not as a means of pri- vate gain, but as a work for souls, even supporting many of his scholars out of his own purse. He cared as much for their spiritual as their intellectual prog- ress, and set them the example of a holy and mortified life. The archbishop, is despair at not being able to promote him as he desired, at last got him to ac- cept the office of dean to a certain college of canons. Wolfgang did not allow the dignity to be a nominal one, but obliged his canons to embrace community life, and to commence a course of sacred studies, assuring them that the sus- tenance of the inner man is as necessary as that of the body. Archbishop Henry dying in 964, Wolfgang, who had only remained at Treves out of affec- tion to him, prepared to return into Swabia, which was his native country. But Bruno had his eye on him, and inviting him to Cologne, offered him every dignity, even the episcopate itself, if he would only remain in his duchy. Wolf- gang, though he persisted in refusing to accept any promotion, felt himself obliged to pass some time at the prince-bishop's court, and testified afterwards 22 EARLY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS AND SCHOLARS. to the fact of his great sanctity. Finding that he could not move the resolu- tion of his friend, Bruno at last reluctantly allowed him to return to Swabia, where he remained only just long enough formally to renounce his hereditary possessions, after which he withdrew to Einsidlen, and took the monastic habit under the English abbot Gregory. ST. UDALRIC OF AUGSBURGH. Udalric was a scholar of St. Gall's, and had given marks of sanctity even during his school days. A minute account of his manner of life when arch- bishop, is given in the beautiful life written by his friend Gerard. Let it suffice to say, that besides singing the Divine Office in the cathedral with his canons, and daily celebrating two or three masses (a privilege then permitted to priests, as we learn from Walafrid Strabo), he every day recited the entire Psalter, the Office of our lady, together with that of the Holy Cross, and of All Saints ; that he entertained a number of poor persons at his table, exercised hospitality on a right loyal scale, administered strict justice to his people, and courageous- ly defended them against the oppression of their feudal lords; finally, that he took particular care of the education of his clergy, and directed the studies of his cathedral school in person, none being better fitted to do so than himself. "When he made the visitation of his diocese, he traveled in a wagon drawn by oxen, which he preferred to riding on horseback, as it enabled him to recite the Psalms with his chaplains with less interruption. In this arrangement he cer- tainly displayed a sound discretion, for in the ancient chronicles of these times, more than one story is preserved of the disasters which befell traveling monks and bishops, owing to their habit of reading on horseback. His cathedral city of Augsburgh was repeatedly attacked by the Huns; and during one of their sieges, the holy bishop, sending the able-bodied men to the walls, collected all the infants in arms whom he could find, and laying them on the floor of the cathedral, before the altar, prostrated himself in prayer, hoping that their tender cries might ascend as prayer before the Throne of God. His prayers were heard, and Augsburgh was delivered. Such was the prelate who at last suc- ceeded in drawing Wolfgang out of his retirement, and compelling him to re- ceive priestly ordination. And in 972 the Emperor Otho II., at the united en- treaties of his bishops, appointed him Bishop of Ratisbon, which he governed for twenty -two years, never, however, laying aside his monastic habit. Henry, duke of Bavaria, thoroughly understood his merits, and knowing his love of the office of teaching, entreated him to take charge of his four children, St. Henry, afterwards emperor of Germany, St. Bruno, who succeeded Udalric in the diocese of Augsburgh, and the two princesses, Gisela and Brigit, who both died in the odor of sanctity. The singular blessing which attended his labor with these and other noble children committed to his care, gave rise to a proverb which deserves remembrance : ' Find saints for masters, and we shall have saints for emperors.' ST. BERXWARD OF HILDESHEIM. Emperor Otho II. was brought up among the canons of Hildesheim, and ac- quired there a taste for letters, which was still further increased by his mar- riage with the Greek princess Theophania, who was brought up at Constanti- nople, then the center of all that remained of the old imperial civilization. She EARLY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS AND SCHOLARS 23 infused into the court circle a rage for Greek literature, and Gerbert speaks in one of his letters of the " Socratic conversation " which he found among the learned men who thronged the company of the empress. As guardian of the young Emperor Otho III., she secured the services, as tutor, of a noble Saxon named Bernward. He was nephew to Folcmar, bishop of Utrecht, who sent him when a child of seven years old to be educated in the episcopal school of Hildesheim, by the grave and holy master Tangmar. This good old man, who afterwards wrote his life, received him kindly, and to test his capacities, set him to learn by heart some of the select passages from Holy Scripture which were usually given to beginners. Little Beruward set himself to learn and meditate on them wiih wonderful ardor, and associating himself to the most studious of his companions, tried with their help thoroughly to master, not only the words, but the hidden sense of his lessons. As he was not yet judged old enough to join any of the classes, he sat apart by himself, but listened at- tentively to the lecture of the master, and the explanations which he gave, and was afterwards found reproducing the same in a grave and sententious manner for the edification of his younger school-fellows. Surprised and delighted at these marks of precocious genius, Tangmar spared no pains in the cultivation of so promising a scholar, and had him constantly by his side. 'Whenever I went abroad on the business of the monastery,' he says, ' I used to take him with me, and I was always more and more struck by his excellent qualities. We often studied the whole day as we rode along on horseback, only more briefly than we were used to do in school ; at one time exercising ourselves in poetry, and amusing ourselves by making verses, at another, arguing on philo- sophic questions. He excelled no less in the mechanical than in the liberal arts. He wrote a beautiful hand, was a good painter, and an equally good sculptor arid worker in metals, and had a peculiar aptitude for all things apper- taining to household and domestic affairs.' Under the care of so devoted a master, the boy Bernward, as the old man always called him, grew up to be a wise and learned man. He had that singular ardour for acquiring knowledge which seems one of the gifts poured out over ages in which its pursuit is hedged about with difficulties that must necessarily discourage a more ordinary amount of zeal. Bernward always read during meal times, and when unable to read himself, he got some one to read to him. His reputation determined Theophania to choose him as tutor to her son, who made great progress under his care, and was then sent to finish his education in the school of the famous Gerbert. Bernward meanwhile was appointed bishop of Hildesheim, and in the midst of his episcopal functions, continued to cultivate literature and the fine arts. He made time by employing the day in business and the night in prayer. He founded scriptoria in many monasteries, and collected a valuable library of sacred and profane authors. He tried to bring to greater perfection the arts of painting, mosaic work, and metal work, and made a valuable col- lection of all those curiosities of fine art which were brought to Otho's court as presents from foreign princes. This collection Bernward used as a studio, for the benefit of a number of youths whom he brought up and instructed in these pursuits. It is not to be said what he did for his own cathedral, supplying it with jeweled missals, thuribles, and chalices, a huge golden corona which hung from the center of the roof, and other like ornaments. The walls he painted with his own hands. The visitor to Hildesheim may still admire the rich 24 EARLY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS AND SCHOLARS. bronze gates, sixteen feet in height, placed in the cathedral by its artist-bishop, the crucifix adorned with filagree-work and jewels, made by his own hands, and the old rose-tree growing on the cloister, which tradition affirms him to have planted. His manner of life is minutely described by his old tutor Tangmar. After high mass every morning he gave audience to any who desired to speak to him, heard causes, and administered justice with great readiness and promptitude. Then his almoner waited on him, and accompanied him to the distribution of his daily alms, for every day a hundred poor persons were fed and relieved at his palace. After this he went the round of his workshops, overlooking each one's work and directing its progress. At the hour of nine he dined with his clerks. There was no worldly pomp observable at his table, but a religious si- lence, all being required to listen to the reading, which was made aloud. BENNON, BISHOP OF MISNIA ST. MEINWERC OF PADERBORN. Bishop Bennon of Misnia belonged to the family of the counts of Saxony, and was placed under the care of St. Bernward at five years of age. The re- stored monastery of Hildesheim, dedicated to St. Michael, of course possessed its school, which was presided over by Wigger, a very skillful master, under whose careful tuition Bennori thrived apace. ' Now as the age was learned,' writes the good canon Jerome Enser who little thought in what light that same age would come to be regarded ' ES the age was learned, and cultivated humane letters, as may be seen by the lives and writings of so many eminent men, Wigger would not allow the child committed to his care to neglect polite letters;' so he set him to work at once to learn to write, being careful to tran- scribe his copies himself. And how well Bennon profited from these early les- sons might yet be seen by any who chose to examine the fine specimens which were preserved in the Church of Misnia when Jerome J^nser wrote his bio- graphy. After this Wigger exercised his pupil in the art of reading, and that of composing verses, taking care to remove from his way every thing offensive to piety or modesty. Bennon had a natural gift of versification, and scon learnt to write little hymns and poems by way of amusement, His progress and his boyish verses endeared him to his masters, and indeed, adds Jerome, 'he was beloved by God and man.' None showed him more affection than St. Bernward, who was now overwhelmed with the infirmities of old age, though his mind was as bright and active as ever. During the last five years of his life he was entirely confined to his bed, and all this time little Bennon proved his chief solace. Sometimes he read aloud to his beloved father. Sometimes he made verses, or held disputations to entertain him ; never would he lea've his side, discharging for him all the offices of which his youth 'was capable. When at last death drew near, Bernward called the child to him together with his master Wigger, and addressed to him a touching exhortation. ' If by rea- son of thy tender age,' he said, 'thou canst not thyself be wise, promise me never to depart from the side of thy preceptor that he may be wise for thee, and that so thou mayest be preserved from the corruptions of the world whilst thy heart is yet soft and tender. Yea, if thou lovest me, love and obey him in all things, as holding the place of thy father.' Then he kissed the child's little hand, and placed it in that of Wigger, and soon after departed this life, rich in good works, and secure of a heavenly reward. EARLY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS AND SCHOLARS. 25 St. Meinwerc, who like Bennon was a pupil of Hildesheim, where he studied along with his cousin St. Henry of Bavaria, and the prince, even after he be- came emperor, remembered their school-boy days together, and was fond of putting him in mind of them by sundry tricks that savored of the grown-up school-boy. Meinwerc was not much of a scholar himself, but when he be- came bishop of Paderborn, he showed a laudable zeal in promoting good schol- arship among his clergy. In fact, he was the founder of those famous schools of Paderborn which are described as flourishing in divine and human science, and which were perfected by his nephew and successor, Imadeus. The boys were all under strict cloisteral discipline ; there were professors of grammar, logic, rhetoric, and music; both the trivium and quadrivium were there taught, together with mathematics, physics, and astronomy. ST. ADALBERT OF PRAGUE. St. Adalbert of Prague was sent to Magdeburg by his parents for education. They were of the Bohemian nation, and had vowed to offer their son to God, should he recover of a dangerous sickness. Before he left his father's house he had learnt the Psalter, and under Otheric, the famous master then presiding over the school of Magdeburg, he made as much progress in sanctity as in learning. He had a habit of stealing away from the school-room in the midst of his studies to refresh his soul with a brief prayer in the church, after which he hastened back and was safe in his place again before the coming of his mas- ter. To conceal his acts of charity from the eyes of others, he chose the night hours for visiting the poor, and dispensing his abundant alms. It often hap- pened that when Otheric was out of the school, the boys would divert them- selves with games more or less mischievous, to relieve the wrary hours of study. Adalbert seldom took part in these pastimes, neither would he share in those stealthy little feasts, which they sometimes held in obscure corners, where they contrived to hide from Otheric's quick eye the sweets and other dainties fur- nished them, as we must suppose, by some medieval tart-woman. However, if Adalbert was proof against this last-named temptation, it appears he was not altogether superior to the love of play, and that when his master's back was turned, he did occasionally throw aside his books and indulge in a game of ball. When such delinquencies came to the ears of Otheric, he did not spare the rod, and on these occasions, observes his biographer, with cruel pleasantry, Adal- bert was often known to speak in three languages. For it was a strict rule that the boys were always to talk Latin in the school-room, and never allow the ears of their master to catch the sound of a more barbarous dialect. "When the rod was produced, therefore, Adalbert would begin by entreating indul- gence in classic phraseology, but so soon as it was applied, he would call out for mercy in German, and finally in Sclavonic. After nine years' study at Magdeburg, Adalbert returned to Bohemia, with the reputation of being spec- ially well read in philosophy, and taking with him a useful library of books which he had collected during his college career. After his consecration as bishop of Prague, at the early age of twenty-seven, he is said never again to have been seen to smile. Twice the hard-heartedness of his people compelled him to abandon his diocese, and after his departure the second time, he traveled as missioner into the then heathen and barbarous provinces of Prussia, where he met with his martyrdom in the year 997. A Sclavonic hymn formerly sung by the Poles when going into battle, is attributed to this saint. 26 EARLY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS AND SCHOLARS. OTHLONUS OF ST. EMMERAN. Othlonus was a Bavarian by birth, and his first school was that of Tegern- see, in Bavaria, a monastery which had been founded in 994, and was famous for its teachers in utrdque lingua and even for its Hebrew scholars. Here, in the twefth century, lived the good monk Metellus, whose eclogues, written in imitation of those of Virgil, describe the monastic pastures and cattle, and the labors of the monks in the fields. The library of Tegernsee was rich in classic works, and possessed a fair illuminated copy of Pliny's 'Natural History,' adorned with pictures of the different animals, from the cunning hand of brother Ellinger. Medicine was likewise studied here, to facilitate which, the monks had a good botanical garden. In such a school Othlonus had every op- portunity of cultivating his natural taste for stud}% which grew by degrees to be a perfect passion. As a child he had intended to embrace the monastic state, but the persuasions of his father, and his own desire to give himself up exclusively to learned pursuits, induced him to abandon this design, and after leaving school he devoted himself for several years to classical studies, with an ardor which his biographer finds no words strong enough to express. His only earthly desire at this time, as he himself tells us in one of his later spiritual treatises, was to have time to study, and abundance of books. It would seem, however, that this excessive devotion to human learning had its usual results in the decay of devotion. It is thus he describes himself at this period of his life, in his versified treatise ' De doctrina Spiritual!.' ' Desiring to search into certain subtle matters, in the knowledge of which I saw that many delighted, to the end that I might be held in greater esteem by the world, I made all my profit to consist in keeping company with the Gentiles. In those days what were not to me Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and Tully the rheto- rician ? . . . that threefold work of Maro, and Lucan, whom then I loved best of all, and on whom I was so intent, that I hardly did any thing else but read him. . . Yet what profit did they give me, when I could not even sign my forehead with the cross ?' However, two severe illnesses wrought a great change in his way of looking at life, and in 1032, remembering his early dedication of himself to God. he re- solved to forsake the world and take the habit of religion in the monastery of St. Emmeran's, at Ratisbon, where he gave up all thoughts of secular ambition, in order to devote himself heart and soul to the duties of his state. St. Em- meran's was, like Tegernsee, possessed of an excellent school and library. In the former, many good scholars were reared, such as abbot William of Hirschau, who became as learned in the liberal arts as in the study of the Scriptures, and who afterwards made his own school at Hirschau one of the most celebrated in Germany. Othlonus tells us that in this monastery he found ' several men in different classes, some reading pagan authors, others the Holy Scriptures,' and that he began to imitate the latter, and soon learnt to relish the Sacred Books, which he had hitherto neglected, far above the writings of Aristotle, Plato, or even Boethius. It will be seen from this little sketch that Othlonus was not a mere tran- scriber, and indeed he afterwards produced several treatises on mystic theology besides his 'Life of St. "Wolfgang,' and was regarded by his brother monks as EARLY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS AiSD SCHOLARS. 27 4 a pious and austere man, possessed of an immense love of books.' This love he showed not only by reading them, but by multiplying them ; and his achieve- ments in this kind are related by himself with a certain prolix eloquence which, in mercy to the reader, I will somewhat abridge. 'I think it right,' he says, 'to add some account of the great capacity of writing which was given me by the Lord from my childhood. When as yet a little child I was sent to school, and quickly learned my letters ; and began long before the usual time of learning, and without any order from the master, to learn the art of writing ; but in a furtive and unusual way, and without any teacher, so that I got a bad habit of holding my pen in a wrong manner, nor were any of my teachers afterwards able to correct me in that point. Many who saw this, decided that I should never write well, but by the grace of God it turned out otherwise. For, even in my childhood, when, together with the other boys, the tablet was put into my hands, it appeared that I had some no- tion of writing. Then after a time I began to write so well and was so fond of it that in the monastery of Tegernsee, where I learned, I wrote many books, and being sent into Franconia, I worked so hard as nearly to lose my sight. . . . Then, after I became a monk of St. Emmeran's, I was induced again to occupy myself so much in writing, that I seldom got an interval of rest except on festi- vals. Meantime there came more work on rne, for as they saw I was generally reading, writing, or composing, they made me schoolmaster; by all which things I was, through God's grace, so fully occupied that I frequently could not allow my body the necessary rest. When I had a mind to compose any thing I could not find time for it, except on holidays or at night, being tied down to the business of teaching the boys, and transcribing what I had undertaken. Besides the books which I composed myself I wrote nineteen missals, three books of the Gospels, and two lectionaries ; besides which I wrote four service books for matins. Afterwards, old age and infirmity hindered me, and the grief caused by the destruction of our monastery ; but to Him who is author of all good, and Who has vouchsafed to give many things to me unworthy, be praise eternal.' He then adds an account of a vast number of other books written out by him and sent as presents to the monasteries of Fulda, Hirsch- feld, Lorsch, Tegernsee, and others, amounting in all to thirty volumes. His labors, so cheerfully undertaken for the improvement of his convent, were per- haps surpassed by those of the monk Jerome, who wrote out so great a num- ber of volumes, that it is said a wagon with six horses would not have sufficed to draw them. But neither one nor the other are to be compared to Diemudis, a devout nun of the monastery of Wessobrun, who, besides writing out in clear and beautiful characters five missals, with graduals and sequences attached, and four other office books, for the use of the church, adorned the library of her convent with two entire Bibles, eight volumes of St. Gregory, seven of St. Augustine, the ecclesiastical histories of Eusebius and Cassiodorus, and a vast number of sermons, homilies, and other treatises, a list of which she left, as having all been written by her own hand, to the praise of God, and of the holy apostles SS. Peter and Paul. This Diemudis was a contempory of Othlonus, and found time in the midst of her gigantic labors to carry on a correspondence with Herluca, a nun of Eppach, to whom she is said to have indited ' many very sweet letters,' which were long preserved. 28 EARLY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS AND SCHOLARS. WILLIAM OF HTRSCHAU. William of Herschau, a scholar of St. Emmeran, was chosen abbot of his mon- astery in 1070, and applied himself to make his monks as learned and as inde- fatigable in all useful labors as he was himself. He had about 250 monks at Hirschau, and founded no fewer than fifteen other religious houses, for the gov- ernment of which he drew up a body of excellent statutes. These new founda- tions he carefully supplied with books, which necessitated constant work in the scriptorium. And a most stately and noble place was the scriptorium of Hirs- chau, wherein each one was employed according to his talent, binding, paint- ing, gilding, writing, or correcting. The twelve best writers were reserved for transcribing the Scriptures and the Holy Fathers, and one of the twelve, most learned in the sciences, presided over the tasks of the others, chose the books to be copied, and corrected the faults of the } r ounger scribes. The art of paint- ing was studied in a separate school, and here, among others, was trained the good monk Thiemon, who. after decorating half the monasteries of Germany with the productions of his pencil, became archbishop of Saltzburg, and died in odor of sanctity. The statutes with which abbot William provided his mon- asteries, were chiefly drawn up from those in use at St. Emmeran's, but he was desirous of yet further improving them, and in particular of assimilating them to those of Cluny, which was then at the height of its renown. It was at his request that St. Ulric of Cluny wrote out his 'Customary,' in which, among other things, he gives a description of the manner in which the Holy Scriptures were read through in the refectory in the course of the year. This ' Customary ' is one of the most valuable monuments of monastic times which remains to us ; it shows as the interior of the monastery painted by the hand of one of its inmates, taking us through each office, the library, the infirmary, the sacristy, the bakehouse, the kitchen, and the school. How beautiful is the order which it displays, as observed in choir, where, on solemn days, all the singers stood vested in copes, the very seats being covered with embroidered tapestry! Three days in the week the right side of the choir communicated, and the other three the left ; during Holy Week they washed the feet of as many poor as there were brethren in the house, and the abbot added others also to represent absent friends. When the Passion was sung, they had a custom of tearing a piece of stuff at the words 'they parted my garments;' and the new fire of Holy Saturday was struck, not from a flint, but a precious beryl. There were numberless beautiful rites of benediction observed, as that of the ripe grapes, which were blessed on the altar during mass, on the 6th of August, and afterwards distributed in the refectory, of new beans, and of the freshly-pressed juice of the grape. The ceremonies observed in making the altar breads were also most worthy of note. The grains of wheat were chosen one by one, were carefully washed and put aside in a sack, which was carried by one known to be pure in life and conversation to the mill. There they were ground and sifted, he who performed this duty being clothed in alb and amice. Two priests and two deacons clothed in like manner prepared the breads, and a lay brother, having gloves on his hands, held the irons in which they were baked. The very wood of the fire was chosen of the best and driest. And whilst these processes were being gone through, the brethren engaged ceased not to sing psalms, or sometimes recited Our Lady's office. A separate EARLY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS AND SCHOLARS 29 chapter in the ' Customary ' is devoted to the children and their master, and the discipline under which they were trained is minutely described. We seen?. to see them seated in their cloister with the vigilant eye of the master presiding over their work. An open space is left between the two rows of scholars, but there is no one in the monastery who dare pass through their ranks. They go to confession twice a week, and always to the abbot or the prior. And such is the scrupulous care bestowed on their education, and the vigilance to which they are subjected, both by day and night, that, says Ulric, 'I think it would be difficult for a king's son to be brought up in a palace with greater care than the humblest boy enjoys at Cluny.' This ' Customary ' was drawn up during the government of St. Hugh of Cluny, whose letter to William the Conqueror displays something of the inde- pendence of mind with which abbots of those days treated the great ones of the earth. William had written to him requesting him to send some of his monks to England, and offering him a hundred pounds for every monk he would send. This method of buying up his monks at so much a head, offended the good abbot, who wrote back to the king declining to part with any of his community at such a price, and adding that he would himself give an equal sum for every good monk whom he could draw to Cluny. During the sixty- two years that he governed his abbey, he is said to have professed more than 10,000 subjects. Enough has been said to show that the monastic institute T^as still strong and vigorous in the llth century. Cluny, indeed, represented monasticism rather in its magnificence than in the more evangelic aspect of poverty and abasement, yet in the midst of all her lordly splendor, she con- tinued fruitful in saints. Even the austere St. Peter Damian, whilst he disap- proved of the wealth of the monks, was edified at their sanctity, and left them, marveling how men so rich could live so holily. Their revenues were not spent on luxury ; they went to feed 17,000 poor people, and to collect a library of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew authors, such as had not its equal in Europe. It contained among other treasures a certain Bible, called in the chronicle, ' great, wonderful, and precious for its writing, correctness, and rich binding, adorned with beryl stones,' written by the single hand of the monk Andrew. MARIANUS SCOTUS. Marianus Scotus, for whose nativity may localities contend (he was called an Irishman,* a Scot, and a Northumbrian), died in the eleventh century, having been successively monk in the abbeys of Cologne, Fulda, and Mayence, and professor of theology some years in that of Ratisbon. He was a poet, and the author of a Chronicle frequently quoted as one of the best mediasval histories, and continued by later writers. His biographers say of him that his counte- nance was so beautiful, and his manners so simple, that no one doubted he was inspired in all he said and did by the Holy Ghost. A most indefatigable writer, he transcribed the whole Bible with sundry commentaries, and that not * It mny be taken us tolerably well proved, however, that he was really an Irishman, and he is supposed to have been a monk of Clonard. Contemporary with him was another famous Irish historian, Tigernach, abbot of Clonmacnoise, who wrote his chronicle partly in Irish and partly in Latin, and is held to have been well acquainted with Greek. The Irish scholars highly dis- tinguished themselves in this century. There was an Irish monastery at Erford, and another at Cologne, into which Helias, a monk of Monnghan, on returning from a visit to Rome, introduced the Roman chant. (Lanigan, Ecc. Hist. c. xxiv.) 30 EARLY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS AND SCHOLARS. once but repeatedly. Moreover he drew out of the deep sea of the holy fathers, certain sweet waters for the profit of his soul, which he collected in prolix vol- umes. With all this he found spare moments which he devoted to charitable labors on behalf of poor widows, clerks, and scholars, for whose benefit he multiplied psalters, manuals, and other pious little books, which he distributed to them free of cost for the remedy of his soul. Who will refuse to believe that such loving 1 toils as these were found worthy to receive the miraculous token of favor related in the old legend? ' One night,' says the annalist. ' the brother whose duty it was, having forgotten to give him candles, Marianus, nevertheless continued his work without them ; and when the brother, recol- lecting his omission, came late at night to his cell, he beheld a brilliant light streaming through the chinks of the door, and going in softly found that it pro- ceeded from the fingers of the monk's left hand, and he saw and believed.' ALBERT THE GREAT OF COLOGNE. The convent of Cologne had already been founded by Henry of Utrecht ; and a namesake of his, Henry the German, who had begun life as a student, then assumed the cross, and finally taken the religious habit, became its first theological professor. And there, in 1230, arrived the young Swabian, Albert of Lauingen, who had been drawn to the Dominican order, whilst pursuing his studies at Padua. Albert during his student-life had been remarkable for his love of the old classic literature, and his enthusiastic admiration for Aristotle ; and had already displayed a singular attraction to those physical sciences which he afterwards so profoundly studied. He had examined various natural phenomena, such as earthquakes, the mephitic vapors issuing from a long closed well, and some curious marks in a block of marble, which he explained in a manner which betrays an acquaintance with some of the chemical theories of modern geology. After going through his theological course at Bologna, he was appointed to fill the vacant post of professor at Cologne, where he taught sacred and human science for some years, and lectured moreover at Hildesheim, Strasburg, Friburg, and Ratisbonn. in which last city an old hall is shown which still bears the title of ' Albert's School/ Converted into a chapel by one of his successors and ardent admirers, it may be supposed to exhibit the same form and arrangement as that which it bore five centuries ago. Round the walls are disposed ancient wooden seats, for the accommodation of the hearers, and fixed against the middle of the wall is an oak chair, or rather pulpit, covered with carvings of a later date, representing St. Vincent Ferrer delivering a lecture, and a novice in the attitude of atten- tion. The chair is of double construction, containing two seats, in one of which sat the master, and in the other the bachelor, who explained under him the Book of the Sentences. All around are texts from the Holy Scriptures, fitly chosen to remind the student in what spirit he should apply himself to the pursuit of sacred letters. l Ama scientiam Scripturarum, et vitia carnis non amabis.' 'Qui addit scientiam addit et laborem.' ' Bonitatem et disciplinam et scientiam doce me.' ' Qui fecerit et docuerit, hie magnus vocabitur in regno ccelorum.' ' Videte ne quis vos decipiat per philosophiam, secundum elementa mundi, et non secundum Christum.' EARLY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS. 3^ In such a hall as this we may picture to ourselves the Blessed Albert the Great lecturing at Cologne in ] 245, where he first received among his pupils that illustrious disciple whose renown, if it eclipsed his own, at the same time constitutes his greatest glory. There are few readers who are not familiar with the student life of St. Thomas of Aquin, the silent habits which exposed him to the witticisms of his companions, who thought the young Sicilian a dull sort of importation, and nicknamed him 'the dumb ox;' the obliging compas- sion which moved a fellow-student to offer him his assistance in explaining the lessons of the master, and the modesty aud humility with which this greatest of Christian scholars veiled his mighty intellect, and with the instinct of the saints, rejoiced to be counted the least among his brethren. But the day came which was to make him known in his true character. His notes and replies to a difficult question proposed by Albert from the writings of St. Denys, fell into the hands of his master, who reading them with wonder and delight, com- manded him on the following day to take part in the scholastic disputation. St. Thomas obeyed, and the audience knew not whether most to admire his eloquence or his erudition. At last Albert, unable to restrain his astonishment, broke out into the memorable words, 'You call this the dumb ox, but I tell you his roaring will be heard throughout the whole world.' From that day St. Thomas became the object of his most solicitous care ; he assigned him a cell adjoining his own, and when in the course of the same year he removed to Paris, to govern the school of St. James for three years, in order afterwards to graduate as doctor, he took his favorite scholar with him. His doctor's triennium had scarcely expired when he was recalled to Cologne to take the Regency of the Sludium Generate, newly erected in that city ; and St. Thomas accompanied him to teach, as licentiate or bachelor, in the school which proved the germ of a future university. This epoch of Albert's life appears to have been that in which most of his philosophic writings were pro- duced. They consist chiefly of his ' Commentary on Aristotle,' in which, after collating the different translations of that author with extraordinary care, he aims at presenting the entire body of his philosophy in a popular as well as a Christian form; a commentary on the Book of the Sentences; other com- mentaries on the Gospels, and on the works of St. Denys, all of which are pre- served; and a devout paraphrase of the Book of the Sentences cast into the form of prayers, which has been lost. His published works alone fill twenty- one folio volumes, and it is said that a great number of other treatises exist in manuscript. The course of the stars; the structure of the universe; the nature of plants, animals, and minerals, appear to him unsuitable subjects for the investigation of a religious man ; and he hints that the seculars who paid for the support of such students by their liberal alms expected them to spend their time on more profitable studies. The reader need not be reminded that Albert was not singular in directing his attention to these subjects, and that the scientific labors of our own Venerable Bede have ever been considered as among his best titles to admiration as a scholar. But more than this, it is surely a narrow and illiberal view to regard the cultivation of science as foreign to the purposes of religion. At the time of which we are now speak- ing, as in our own, physical science was unhappily too often made an instru- ment for doing good service to the cause of infidelity. It was chiefly, if not exclusively, in the hands of the Arabian philosophers, who had dra\vn great 32 EARLY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS part of their errors from the physics of Aristotle. Schlegel, indeed, considers that the extraordinary popularity of Aristotle in the middle ages did not so much arise from the love of the medieval schoolmen for his rationalistic philosophy, as from the attraction they felt to some great find mysterious knowledge of nature. His works seemed to give promise of unlocking to them those vast intellectual treasures reserved for the scrutiny of our own age, but of the existence of which they possessed a kind of dim half-consciousness. Hence the teachers of the thirteenth century could hardly do more effective service to the cause of truth than by handling these subjects according to a Christian method, and proving that faith and science were in no sense opposed to one another. Hallam affects to grieve over the evil inflicted on Europe by the credit which Albert's influence gave to the study of astrology, alchemy, and magic. The author of Cosmos, however, passes a very different verdict on the nature of his scientific writings, and one which our readers will be disposed to receive as more worthy of attention. 'Albertus Magnus,' says Humboldt, 'was equally active and influential in promoting the study of natural science, and of the Aristotelian philosophy His works contain some exceedingly acute remarks on the organic structure and physiology of plants. One of his works, bearing the title of Liber Cosmoyraphicus de Natura Locorum, is a species of physical geography. I have found in it considerations on the dependence of temperature concurrently on latitude and elevation, and on the effect of different angles of incidence of the sun's rays in heating the ground, which have excited my surprise. 1 * Jourdain, another modern critic, sa)-s, ' whether we consider him as a theologian or a philosopher, Albert was undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary men of his age ; I might say, one of the most wonderful men of genius who has appeared in past times.' It may be of interest to notice here a few of the scientific views of Albert, which show how much he owed to his own sagacious observation of natural phenomena, and how far he was in advance of his age. He decides that the Milky "Way is nothing but a vast assemblage of stars, but supposes, naturally enough, that they occupy the orbit which receives the light of the sun. The figures visible on the moon's disk are not, he says, as has hitherto been sup- posed, reflections of the seas and mountains of the earth, but configurations of her own surface. He notices, in order to correct it, the assertion of Aristotle that lunar rainbows appear only twice in fifty years; 'I myself,' he says, 'have observed two in a single year.' He has something to say on the refraction of the solar ray, notices certain crystals which have a power of refraction, and remarks that none of the ancients, and few moderns, were acquainted with the properties of mirrors. In his tenth book, wherein he catalogues and describes all the trees, plants, and herbs known in his time, he observes, ' all that is here set down is the result of our own experience, or has been bor- rowed from authors, whom we know to have written what their personal experi- ence has confirmed: for in these matters experience alone can give certainty.' (Experimentum solum certificat talibus). Such an expression, which might have proceeded from the pen of Bacon, argues in itself a prodigious scientific progress, and shows that the medieval friar was on the track so successfully pursued by modern natural philosophy. He had fairly shaken off the shackles * The verv remarkab'e pnssage here referred to by Hnmboldt is to be found in the Treatise ' De coelo et mundo.' It is translated nt length in Sighart's JJfe of B. Jllbert (ch. xxxix.), from which work has been chiefly extracted the summary of his scientific views given in the text. EARLY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS. 33 which had hitherto tied up discovery, and was the slave neither of Pliny nor of Aristotle. He treats as fabulous the commonly received idea, in which Bede had acquiesced, that the region of the earth south of the equator was uninhabitable and considers that, from the equator to the south pole, the earth was not only habitable, but, in all probability, actually inhabited, except directly at the poles, where he imagines the coid to be excessive. If there are any animals there, he says, they must have very thick skins to defend them from the rigor of the climate, and are probably of a white color. The intensity of cold is, however, tempered by the action of the sea. He describes the antipodes and the countries they comprise, and divides the climate of the earth into seven zones. He smiles with a scholar's freedom at the simplicity of those who sup- pose that persons living at the opposite region of the earth must fall off an opinion which can only arise out of the grossest ignorance, 'for, when we speak of the lower hemisphere, this must be understood merely as relatively to ourselves.' It is as a geographer that Albert's superiority to the writers of his own time chiefly appears. Bearing in mind the astonishing ignorance which then prevailed on this subject, it is truly admirable to find him correctly tracing the chief mountain chains of Europe, with the rivers which take their source in each, remarking on portions of coast which have in later times been sub- merged by the ocean, and islands which have been raised, by volcanic action, above the level of the sea, noticing the modification of climate caused by mountains, seas, and forests ; and the divisions of the human race, whose differences he ascribes to the effect of the countries they inhabit. In speaking of the British Isles, he alludes to the commonly received idea that another distant island, called Tile or Thule, existed far in the Western Ocean, unin- habitable by reason of its frightful climate, but which, he says, has perhaps not yet been visited by man. He was acquainted with the sleep of plants, with the periodical opening and closing of blossoms, with the diminution of sap during evaporation from the cuticle of the leaves, and with the influence of the distribution of the bundles of vessels on the folial indentations. His minute observations on the forms and variety of plants intimate an exquisite sense of floral beauty. He distinguishes the star from the bell-flower, tells us that a red rose will turn white when submitted to the vapor of sulphur, and makes some very sagacious observations on the subject of germination. Having, in his tenth book, given a catalogue and description of the most com- monly known trees, shrubs, and herbs, he tells us that all he here relates is either the fruit of his own observation, or borrowed from writers whose accuracy he can attest. The extraordinary erudition and originality of this treatise has drawn from M. Meyer the following comment : ' No botanist who lived before Albert can be compared to him, unless it be Theophrastus, with whom he was not acquainted ; and after him none has painted nature in such living colors, or studied it so profoundly, until the time of Conrad, Gesner, and Cesalpini. All honor, then, to the man who made such astonishing progress in the science of nature as to find no one, I will not say to surpass, but even to equal him for the space of three centuries.' In the Treatise on Animals which Jourdain particularly praises, nineteen books are a paraphrase of Michael Scott's translation of Aristotle, but the remaining seven books are Albert's own, and form a precious link between 3 34 EARLY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS. ancient and modern science. It was not extraordinaiy that one who had so deeply studied nature, and had mastered so many of her secrets, should by his wondering contemporaries have been judged to have owed his marvelous knowledge to a supernatural source, or that his mechanical contrivances, his knowledge of the power of mirrors, and his production of a winter-garden, or hothouse, where on the feast of the Epiphany 1249, he exhibited to William of Holland, king of the Romans, plants and fruit-trees in full blossom, should have subjected him in the mind of the vulgar to the suspicion of sorcery. But it is certainly surprising that such charges should be reproduced by modern critics, who, it might have been thought, would have condemned the very belief in witchcraft as a mediaeval superstition. The more so as Albert devotes no inconsiderable portion of his pages to the exposure and refutation of those forbidden arts, which he will not allow to be reckoned among the sciences, such as geomancy, chiromancy, and a formidable list of other branches of magic. During the time that Albert was engaged in these labors, his daily life was one which might rather have seemed that of a contemplative than of a student of physical science. ' I have seen, and know of a truth,' s^ys his disciple Thomas, of Cantimpre, ' that the venerable Albert, whilst for many years he daily lectured on theology, yet watched day and night in prayer, daily recited the entire Psalter, and at the conclusion of every lesson and disputation gave himself up to Divine contemplation.' His skill as a master drew an incredible number of students to Cologne, whom he not only inspired with his own love of science, but directed in the spiritual life. Among these were the blessed Ambrose of Siena, and Ulrich of Engelbrecht, who afterwards became provincial of Germany, and made use of the mechanical and scientific lore he had acquired from his master in the construction of the great organ in Strasburg cathedral. After lecturing for four years in Cologne, he was recalled to Paris in order to take his degrees, and though under tiie accustomed age, for he was then but twenty-five, no opposition was offered on the part of the university to his being received as Bachelor, and lecturing as such in the public schools. But at the end of the year, when he should, by right, have proceeded to the degree of Doctor, the quarrel which had already broken out between the seculars and regulars was fanned into a flame by the calumnies of William de fcit. Amour, and the secular Regents persisted in refusing to admit the friars to any of the theological chairs. The dispute being at last referred to Rome, St. Thomas was summoned thither, and by his eloquent defense procured the condemnation of St. Amour's book on ' The Perils of the Latter Times,' in which the religious orders were attacked in scandalous terms. Not only were the deputies of the university obliged to subscribe this condemnation, but also to promise on oath, in presence of the cardinals, to receive members of the two mendicant orders to their academic degrees, and especially St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas, who had hitherto been unable to obtain their Doctor's caps. The publication of the Pope's bull, and the authority of St. Louis, finally brought this vexatious dispute to a close, but the university authorities, though forced to yield, con- trived to give expression to their ill-will by an act which provided that the Dominicans should always hold the last place, not only after the secular regents, but after those of every other religious body. CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS, TEACHERS, AND SCHOLARS. 35 THE ABBEY OF ST. GALL.* THE Abbey of St. Gall owed its origin to an Irish disciple, of that name, of St. Coluinbauus, who, in the seventh century, penetrated into the recesses of the Helvetian mountains, and there fixed his abode in the midst of a pagan population. Under the famous abbot St. Othmar, who flourished in the time of Pepin, the monks received the Benedictine rule, and from that time the mon- astery rapidly grew in fame and prosperity, so that in the ninth century it was regarded as the first religious house north of the Alps. It is with a sigh of that irrepressible regret called forth by the remembrance of a form of beauty that is dead and gone for ever, that the monastic historian hangs over the early chronicles of St. Gall. It lay in the midst of the savage Helvetian wilderness, an oasis of piety and civilization. Looking down from the craggy mountains, the passes of which open upon the southern extremity of the lake of Con- stance, the traveler would have stood amazed at the sudden apparition of that vast range of stately buildings which almost filled up the valley at his feet. Churches and cloisters, the offices of a great abbey, buildings set apart for stu- dents and guests, workshops of every description, the forge, the bakehouse, and the mill, or rather mills, for there were ten of them, all in such active ope- ration, that they every year required ten new millstones ; and then the houses occupied by the vast numbers of artisans and workmen attached to the monas- tery ; gardens, too, and vineyard creeping up the mountain slopes, and beyond them fields of waving corn, and sheep speckling the green meadows, and far away boats busily plying on the lake and carrying goods and passengers what a world it was of life and activity ; yet how unlike the activity of a town! It was, in fact, not a town, but a house, a family presided over by a father, whose members were all knit together in the bonds of common fraternity. I know not whether the spiritual or the social side of such a religious colony were most fitted to rivet the attention. Descend into the valley, and visit all these nurseries of useful toil, see the crowds of rude peasants transformed into intelligent artisans, and you will carry away the impression that the monks of St. Gall had found out the secret of creating a world of happy Christian fac- tories. Enter their church and listen to the exquisite modulations of those chants and sequences peculiar to the abbey which boasted of possessing the most scientific school of music in all Europe, visit their scriptorium, their li- brary, and their school, or the workshop where the monk Tutilo is putting the finishing touch to his wonderful copper images, and his fine altar frontals of gold and jewels, and you will think yourself in some intellectual and artistic academy. But look into the choir, and behold the hundred monks who form the community at their midnight office, and you will forget every thing, save the saintly aspect of those servants of God who shed abroad over the desert around them the good odor of Christ, and are the apostles of the provinces which own their gentle sway. You may quit the circuit of the abbey and plunge once more into the mountain region which rises beyond, but you will have to wander far before you find yourself beyond the reach of its softening humanizing influence. Here are distant cells and hermitages with their chapels, where the shepherds come for early mass ; or it may be that there meets you, winding over the mountain paths of which they sing so sweet- * Christian Schools and Scholars. Longman : 1867. 36 CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS, TEACHERS, AND SCHOLARS. ly,* going up and down among the hills into the thick forests and the rocky hol- lows, a procession of the monks carrying their relics, and followed by a peasant crowd. In the schools you may have been listening to lectures in the learned, and even in the Eastern tongues ; but in the churches, and here among the mountains, you will hear these fine classical scholars preaching plain truths, in barbarous idioms, to a rude race, who, before the monks came among them, sacrificed to the Evil One, and worshiped stocks and stones Yet, hidden away as it was among its crags and deserts, the abbey of St. Gall was almost as much a place of resort as Rome or Athens at least to the learned world of the ninth century. Her schools were a kind of university, frequented by men of all nations, who came hither to fit themselves for all pro- fessions. You would have found here not monks alone and future scholastics, but courtiers, soldiers, and the sons of kings. The education given was very far from being exclusively intended for those aspiring to the ecclesiastical state; it had a large admixture of the secular element, at any rate in the exterior school. Not only were the Sacred sciences taught with the utmost care, but the classic authors were likewise explained; Cicero, Horace, Virgil, Lucan, and Terence were read by the scholars, and none but the very little boys presumed to speak in any thing but Latin. The subjects for their original compositions were mostly taken from Scripture and Church history, and having written their exercises they were expected to recite them, the proper tones being indicated by musical notes. Many of the monks excelled as poets, others cultivated pauiting and sculpture, and other exquisite cloistral arts ; all diligently applied to the grammatical formation of the Tudesque dialect, and rendered it capable of producing a literature of its own. Their library in the eighth century was only in its infancy, but gradually became one of the richest in the world. They were in correspondence with all the learned monastic houses of France and Italy, from whom they received the precious codex, now of a Virgil or a Livy, now of the Sacred Books, and sometimes of some rare treatise on medicine or astronomy. They were Greek students, moreover, and those most addicted to the cultivation of the ' Cecropian Muse ' were denominated the ' fratres El- lenici.' The beauty of their early manuscripts is praised by all authors, and the names of their best transcribers find honorable mention in their annals. They manufactured their own parchment out of the hides of the wild beasts that roamed through the mountains and forests around them, and prepared it with such skill that it acquired a peculiar delicacy. Many hands were em- ployed on a single manuscript. Some made the parchment, others drew the fair red lines, others wrote on the pages thus prepared ; more skillful hands put in the gold and the initial letters, and more learned heads compared the copy with the original text, this duty being generally discharged during the interval between matins and lauds, the daylight hours being reserved for actual transcription. Erasure, when necessary, was rarely made with the knife, but an erroneous word was delicately drawn through by the pen. so as not to spoil the beauty of the codex. Lastly came the binders, who inclosed the whole in boards of wood, cramped with ivory or iron, the Sacred Volumes being covered with plates of gold, and adorned with jewels. * Scandens et descendens inter montium confinia Silvarum scrutando loca, valliumque concava. (Hymn for the Procession of Relics, ap. Leibnitz.) CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS, TEACHERS, AND SCHOLARS. 37 Among the masters and scholars, whose reputation shed a lustre on the annals of St. Gall, was Iso, styled by Ekkehard, 'a doctor magnificus,' whose pupils were in great demand by all the monasteries of Gall and Burgundy, and Moen- gall (or Marcellus, a nephew of the Irish bishop Marx, both of whom entered the cloister in 840, on their return from Rome), who extended, if he did not in- troduce the study of Greek into the interior school. Of the pupils of the lat- ter, Notker, Ratpert, and Tutilo, were distinguished for rare scholarship, and in music, sculpture, and painting. Tutilo could preach both in Latin and Greek ; and statuary of his workmanship adorned most of the finest 'churches in Ger- many. Ratpert succeeded master Iso in the external school, and was famous as a poet. But Notker was the best type of the culture of St. Gall at once scholar, poet and musician. It was the reputation of learning enjoyed by St. Gall which had first at- tracted him thither, for indeed, says Ekkehard, 'he was devoured with a love of grammar.' Like a true poet, he was keenly susceptible to the sights and sounds of nature, and loved to ' study her beautifulness ' in that enchanted re- gion of lakes and mountains. The gentle melancholy inseparable from exalted genius, which in him was increased by his exceeding delicacy of organization, found its expression in the wild and mystic melodies which he composed. The monotonous sound of a im'll-wheel near the abbey suggested to him the music of the 'Media Vita,' the words being written whilst looking into a deep gulf over which some laborers were constructing a bridge. This antiphon became very popular in Germany, and was every year sung at St. Gall during the Ro- gation Processions But it was not as a poet or man of science that the ' Blessed Notker ' was best known to posterity ; profoundly learned in human literature, he yet, says Ekkehard, applied more to the Psalter than to any other book. Even in his own lifetime he was revered as a saint. He was master of the inferior and claustral school at the same time as Ratpert governed the exterior school, and kept up the same strict discipline, 'stripes only excepted.' The gentleness of his disposition peeps out in the fact that one of the faults he was hardest on in his pupils was the habit of bird's-nesting. He was always accessible ; no hour of day or night was ever deemed unseasonable for a visit from any one who brought a book in their hands. For the sake of maintaining regular observance, he once forbade his disciples to whisper to him in time of silence, but the abbot enjoined him under obedience to let them speak to him whenever they would. Ratpert relates a story of him, which shows the opin- ion of learning and sanctity in which he was held. The emperor Charles, hav- ing on one occasion come to the monastery on a visit, he brought in his suite a certain chaplain, whose pride appears to have taken offense at the consideration with which his master treated the Blessed Notker. When they were about to depart, therefore, seeing the man of God sitting, as was his custom, with the Psalter in his hand, and recognizing him to be the same man who, on the pre- vious day, had solved many hard questions proposed to him by Charles, he said to his companions, ' There is he who is said to be the most learned man in the whole empire. But if you like, I will make this most excellent wiseacre a laughing-stock for you, for I will ask him a question, which, with all his learning he will not be able to answer.' Curious to see what he would do, and how Notker would deal with him, they agreed to his proposal, and all went to- gether to salute the master who courteously rose, and asked them what they 3S CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS, TEACHERS. AND SCHOLARS. desired. Then said the unhappy man of whom we spoke, ' most learned master, we are very well aware that there is nothing you do not know. We therefore desire you to tell us, if you can. what God is now doing in heaven ?' ' Yes,' replied Notker, ' I can answer that question very well. He is doing what he always has done, and what He is shortly about to do to thee, He is exalting the humble, and humbling the proud.' The scoffer moved away, while the laugh was turned against him. Nevertheless, he made light of Notker's words, and the prediction of evil which they seemed to contain regarding him- self. Presently the bell rang for the king's departure, and the chaplain, mount- ing his horse, rode off with a great air in front of his master. But before he came to the gate of the city the steed fell, and the rider being thrown on his face, broke his leg. Abbot Hartmot hearing of this accident, desired Notker to visit the sick man, and pardon him, giving him his blessing. But the foolish chaplain protested that the misfortune had nothing to do with Notker's predic- tion, and continued to speak of him with the greatest contempt. His leg, how- ever, remained in a miserable state, until one night his friends besought Notker to come to him and aid him with his prayers. He complied willingly enough, and touching the leg, it was immediately restored; and by this lesson the chaplain learnt to be more humble for the future. Notker was the author of various works, amongst others of a German translation of the Psalter, which Vadianus speaks of in his treatise on the 'An- cient Colleges of Germany,' and which he says is scarcely intelligible by reason of the excessive harshness of the old Tudesque dialect. He gives a translation of the 'Creed,' and the 'Our Father,' from Notker's version, in which it is not difficult to trace the German idiom. Notker's German studies were yet more extensively carried on by his namesake, Notker Labeo, or the Thick-Lipped, who wrote many learned works in the vernacular, and was also a great classic- al scholar. He translated into German the works of Aristotle, Boethius, and Martian Capella, and some musical treatises, all which are still preserved. His translation of St. Gregory's 'Morals' is lost. He is commemmorated in the chronicles of his House as 'the kind and learned master,' and whilst he pre- sided over the claustral school, he educated a great many profound scholars, among whom was Ekkehard junior, the author of the chronicle 'De Casibus S. Galli,' and of the celebrated ' Liber Benedictionum.' This Ekkehard, at the request of the empress, transcribed Notker's ' Paraphrase of the Psalms ' for her use with his own hand, and corrected a certain poem which his predecessor Ekkehard I. had written when a school-boy, and which was full of Tudesque barbarisms, such as the delicate ear of Ekkehard junior might not abide. He held that the barbarous idioms could not be translated into Latin without a great deal of painstaking. ' Think in German,' he would say to his scholars, 'and then be careful to render your thought into correct Latin ' There was yet a third Ekkehard whose memory is preserved in the annals of St. Gall un- der the surname of Palatinus. He was nephew to Ekkehard I., and presided over both the exterior and interior schools, and that with great success He made no distinction between noble and plebeian scholars, but employed those who had less talent for learning, in writing, painting, and other like arts. He was able to take down in short-hand the substance of any thing he heard, and two discourses are still preserved thus noted by his hand. He was afterwards most unwillingly summoned to the Court of Otho I., who appointed him his CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS, TEACHERS, AND SCHOLARS. 39 chaplain and secretary, and tutor to his son Otho II. So venerated was this great man throughout Germany, that when he attended the council of Mentz in 976, six bishops rose up to salute their old master, all of them having been educated in the school of St. Gall. To this list of masters I must add the name of another Notker, who, from his strict observance of discipline, received the surname of ' Piperis-granurn,' or the Peppercorn, though his pungency of temper did not prevent his brethren from commemmorating him in their obit- uary as the 'Doctor benignissimus.' He was renowned as a physician, a painter, and a poet, and was also well skilled in music. ABBEY OP REICHENAU. MEINRAD.* At the western extremity of the lake of Constance, just where it narrows to- wards the outlet of the Rhine, lies a green island sparkling like an emerald gem on the unruffled surface of the waters. There, halt hidden amid the lux- uriant foliage, you may still see the minster of that famous abbey called Angia by its Latin historians, but better known by its German name of Reichenau. Reichenau had its own line of great masters, among whom Ermenric, who could do such generous justice to the excellence of others, was himself worthy to be reckoned. The most illustrious was, perhaps, the cripple Hermann Con- tractus, originally a pupil of St. Gall's, who is said to have prayed that he might not regain the use of his limbs, but that he might receive instead a knowledge of the Scriptures. He was master of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic; he wrote treatises on history, poetry, ethics, astronomy, and math- ematics; he calculated eclipses, and explained Aristotle, and, in spite of an im- pediment in his speech, his lectures were so learned that he had pupils from the most distant provinces of Italy. He set his own poems to music, made clocks and organs, and was as much revered for his sanctity as his universal genius. Many hymns and antiphons used by the Church are attributed to his pen, among others the Alma Rtdemptoris. But if Hermann was the most famous scholar of Reichenau, a yet greater celebrity, though of a different kind, at- taches to the name of Meinrad. The story of his vocation to the eremitical life affords an apt illustration of the contemplative character already noticed as so frequently belonging to the early pedagogues; and as it presents us with an agreeable picture of a ' whole play-day ' in the Dark Ages, we will give it as it stands in the pages of the monk Berno. Meinrad was the son of a Swabian nobleman of the house of Hollenzollern, and had studied in the monastic school under abbot Hatto and his own uncle Erlebald. When the latter became abbot he appointed Meinrad to the care of the school which was attached to a smaller house dependent on Reichenau, and situated at a spot called Bollingen, on the lake of Zurich. He accordingly removed thither, and had singular success with his scholars, whom he inspired with great affection by reason of his gentle discipline. He used to take them but for walking parties and fishing parties, into what Berno, his biographer, calls 'the wilderness,' a wilderness, however, which was adorned with a majestic beauty to which Meinrad was not insensi- ble. One day he and his boys crossed the lake in a small boat, and landing on the opposite shore, sought, for some quiet spot where they might cast their fishing-lines. Finding a little stream which flowed into the lake and gave * Christian Schools and Scholars. Vol. I., p. 240. 40 CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS, TEACHERS, AND SCHOLARS. good promise of trout, Meinrad left them to pursue their sport, and strolled about, meditating on the joys of that solitary life after which he secretly pined. After a while, returning to his scholars, he found that their fishing had been unusually successful, and taking up their baskets, they retraced their steps to the village of Altendorf, where they entered the house of a certain matron to rest and refresh themselves with food. Whilst the boys ate and drank, and en- joyed themselves in their own way, Meinrad and their hostess engaged in con- versation, and Meinrad, who was full of the thoughts to which his mountain walk had given rise, opened his whole heart to her. 'Beyond all riches.' lie said, ' I desire to dwell alone in this solitude, that so I might wholly give my- self to prayer, could I but find some one who would minister to me in temporal things.' The good lady immediately offered to provide him with whatever he wanted, in order to carry out his design ; and the result of that day's fishing- party was the establishment of the former scholasticus of Bollingen in a little hermitage which he constructed for himself out of the wattled boughs of trees. But he found himself in one way disappointed ; he had sought the desert to fly from the world, and the world followed him thither in greater throngs than he had ever encountered at Reichenau. The saints possess a strange power of at- traction, and neither mountains nor forests are able to hide them. In his own day men compared St. Meinrad to the Baptist, because the multitudes went out into the wilderness to hear him preach penance and remission of sins. For seven years he continued to dispense the Word of Life to the pilgrims who gathered about him. from all parts of Europe. But one day unable to resist his longing for retreat, he took his image of Our Lady, a missal, a copy of St. Bene- dict's rule, and the works of Cassian, and laden with these, his only treasures, he plunged into the forest, and choosing a remote and secluded spot, erected a rude chapel which he dedicated to Our Lady, and a yet ruder dwelling for him- self. There he lived for thirty years, and at the end of that time he was assas- sinated in his hermitage by some ruffians who hoped to find some hidden treasure in his cell. His body was carried back to Reichenau, and in after years (about 988) the great sanctuary of Einsiedeln rose over the site of his hermitage, where is still venerated the image of Our Lady which he had formerly carried thither with his own hands. EINSIEDELN. The Abby of Einsiedeln, after encountering many disasters by fire and spoli- ation, has outlived the sanctity and present usefulness of both St. Gall and Reichenau, and is still the resort annually of thousands of pilgrims from all parts of Europe. In 1861, on the celebration of the 1000th anniversary of its foundation, an almost incredible concourse of people assembled to make their offerings to ' Our Lady of the Hermits.' On this occasion, the King of Prussia and Prince of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen presented the Abby with two valuable historical paintings by Mticke, of Dusseldorf, one representing St. Meinrad preaching on the Etzel, and the other the presentation of the Sacred Image by Hildegarde, first Abbess of the convent of Zurich. The Abbey now num- bers sixt}' priests, and twenty brothers of the Benedictine order, with a number of lay brethren for the management of the property. ST BENEDICT AND HIS RULE. ^ MONASTIC INSTITUTIONS AND CIVILIZATION. To appreciate the services rendered by the institutions which grew up under the rule of St. Benedict, we must look closely into the state of society which existed at the advent of Christianity, and which succeeded the downfall of the Roman Empire, and the processes by which the new civilization was planted in regions before utterly barbarous. Dr. Newman has described, in a short chapter, the Downfall and Refuge of Ancient Civilization, portions of which we introduce here. There never was, perhaps, in the history of this tumultuous world, prosperity so great, so far-spreading, so lasting, as that which began throughout the vast Empire of Rome, at the time when the Prince of Peace was born into it. Pre- ternatural as was the tyranny of certain of the Cassars, it did not reach the mass of the population ; and the reigns of the five good emperors, who suc- ceeded them, are proverbs of wise and gentle government. The sole great ex- ception to this universal happiness was the cruel persecution of the Christians ; the sufferings of a whole world fell and were concentrated on them, and the children of heaven were tormented, that the sons of men might 'enjoy their revel Their Lord, while His shadow brought peace upon earth, foretold that in the event He came to send ' not peace but a sword ; ' and that sword was first let loose upon His own people. ' Judgment commenced with the House of God ; ' and though, as time went on, it left Jerusalem behind, and began to career round the world and sweep the nations as it traveled on, nevertheless, as if by some paradox of Providence, it seemed at first, that truth and wretch- edness had 'met together,' and sin and prosperity had 'kissed one another.' The more the heathens enjoyed themselves, the more they scorned, hated, and persecuted their true light and true peace. They persecuted Him, for the very reason that they had little else to do ; happy and haughty, they saw in Him the sole drawback, the sole exception, the sole hindrance, to a universal, a continual sunshine ; they called Him ' the enemy of the human race ;' and they felt themselves bound, by their loyalty to the glorious and immortal memory of their forefathers, by their traditions of state, and their duties towards their children, to trample upon, and, if they could, to stifle that teach- ing, which was destined to be the life and mold of a new world. But our immediate subject here is, riot Christianity, but the world that passed away ; and before it passed, it had, I say, a tranquillity great in propor- tion to its former commotions. Ages of trouble terminated in two centuries of peace. The present crust of the earth is said to be the result of a long war of elements, and to have been made so beautiful, so various, so rich, and so useful, by the disciple of revolutions, by earthquake and liirhtning, by mountains of water and seas of fire ; and so in like manner, it required the events of two thousand years, the multiform fortunes of tribes and populations, the rise and fall of kings, the mutual collision of states, the spread of colonies, the vicissitudes and the succession of conquests, and the gradual adjustment and settlement of innumerous discordant ideas and interests, to carry on the human race to unity, and to shape and consolidate the gnat Roman Power. And when once those unwieldy materials were welded together into one mass, what human force could split them up again? what 'hammer of the earth ' could shiver at a stroke a solidity which had taken ages to form ? "Who can estimate the strength of a political establishment, which has been the slow birth of time? and what establishment ever equaled pagan Rome? Hence has come the proverb, ' Rome was not built in a day;' it was the portentous solidity of its power that forced the gazer back upon an exclamation, which was the relief of his astonishment, as being his solution of the prodigy. And, When at length it was built, Rome, so long in building, was 'Eternal Rome;' it had been done once for all ; its being was inconceivable beforehand, and its not being was inconceivable afterwards. It had been a miracle that it was 42 ST. BENEDICT AND HIS RULE. brought to be ; it would take a second miracle that it should cease to be. To remove it from its place was to cast a mountain into the sea. Look at the Palatine Hill, penetrated, traversed, cased with brickwork, till it appears a work of man, not of nature ; run your eye along the cliffs from Ostia to Ter- racina, covered with the debris of masonry ; gaze around the bay of Baiee, whose rocks have been made to serve as the foundations and the walls of palaces ; and in those mere remains, lasting to this day, you will have a type of the moral and political strength of the establishments of Rome. Think of the aqueducts making for the imperial city, for miles across the plain; think of the straight roads stretching off again from that one centre to the ends of the earth: consider the vast territory round about it strewn to this day with countless ruins; follow in your imagination its suburbs, extending along its roads, for as much, at least in some directions, as forty miles; and number up its continuous mass of population, amounting, as grave authors say, to almost six millions ; and answer the question, how was Rome ever to be got rid of? why was it not to progress ? why was it not to progress for ever ? where was that ancient civilization to end? Such were the questionings and anticipations of thoughtful minds, not specially proud or fond of Rome. ' The world,' says Tertullian, ' has more of cultivation every day, and is better furnished than in times of old. All places are opened up now ; all are familiarly known ; all are scenes of business. Smiling farms have obliterated the notorious wilderness; tillage has tamed the forest land ; flocks have put to flight the beasts of prey. Sandy tracts are sown ; rocks are put into shape ; marshes are drained. There are more cities now, than there were cottages at one time. Islands are no longer wild ; the crag is no longer frightful ; everywhere there is a home, a population, a state, and a livelihood.' Such was the prosperity, such the promise of progress and permanence, in which the Assyrian, the Persian, the Greek, the Macedonian conquests had terminated Education had gone through a similar course of difficulties, and had a place in the prosperous result. First, carried forth upon the wings of genius, and disseminated by the energy of individual minds, or by the colonizing missions of single cities, knowledge was irregularly extended to and fro over the spacious regions, of which the Mediterranean is the common basin. Intro- duced, in course of time, to a more intimate alliance with political power, it received the means, at the date of Alexander and his successors, both of its cultivation and its propagation. It was formally- recognized and endowed under the Ptolemies, and at length became a direct object of the solicitude of the government under the Caesars. It was honored and dispensed in every considerable city of the Empire ; it tempered the political administration of the conquering people; it civilized the manners of a hundred barbarian con- quests ; it gradually reconciled uncongenial, and associated distant countries, with each other ; while it had ever ministered to the fine arts, it now proceeded to subserve the useful. It took in hand the reformation of the world's re- ligion; it began to harmonize the legends of discordant worships ; it purified the mythology by making it symbolical; it interpreted it, and gave it a moral, and explained away its idolatry. It began to develope a system of ethics, it framed a code of laws ; what might not be expected of it, as time went on, were it not for that illiberal, unintelligible, fanatical, abominable sect of Gali- leans? If they were allowed to make play, and get power, what might not happen? There again Christians were in the way, as hateful to the philosopher, as to the statesman. Yet in truth it was not in this quarter that the peril of civilization lay ; it lay in a very different direction, over against the Empire to the North and North-east, in a black cloud of inexhaustible barbarian popula- tions; and when the stor.m mounted overhead and broke upon the earth, it was those scorned and detested Galileans, and none but they, the men-haters and God-despisers. who, returning good for evil, housed and lodged the scat- tered remnants of that old world's wisdom, which had so persecuted them, went forth valiantly to meet the savage destroyer, tamed him without arms, and became the founders of a new and higher civilization. Not a man in Europe now, who talks bravely against the Church, but owes it to the Church, that he can talk at all. ST. BENEDICT AND HIS RULE. 43 But what was to be the process, what the method, what the instruments, what the place, for sheltering the treasures of ancient intellect during the convulsion, of bridging over the abyss, and of linking the old world to the new? In spite of the consolidation of its power, Rome was to go, as all things human go, and vanish for ever. In the words of inspiration, ' Great Babylon came in remembrance before God, and every island fled away, and the mountains were not found.' All the fury of the elements was directed against it ; and, as a continual dropping wears away the stone, so blow after blow, and revolution after revolution, sufficed at last to heave up, and hurl down, and smash into fragments, the noblest earthly power that ever was. First came the Goth, then the Hun, and then the Lombard. The Goth took posses- sion, but he was of noble nature, and soon lost his barbarism. The Hun came came next ; he was irreclaimable, but did not stay. The Lombard kept both his savageness and his ground; he appropriated to himself the territory, not the civilization of Italy, fierce as the Hun, and powerful as the Goth, the most tremendous scourge of Heaven. In his'dark presence the poor remains of Greek and Roman splendor died away, and the world went more rapidly to ruin, material and moral, than it was advancing from triumph to triumph in the Tertullian. Alas ! the change between Rome in the hey-day of her pride, and in the agony of her judgment ! Tertullian writes while she is exalted ; Pope Gregory when she is in humiliation. He was delivering homilies upon the Prophet Ezekiel, when the news came to Rome of the advance of the Lombards upon the city, and in the course of them he several times burst out into lamentations at the news of miseries, which eventually obliged him to cut short his exposition. ' Sights and sounds of war,' he says, ' meet us on every side. The cities are destroyed ; the military stations broken up ; the land devastated ; the earth de- populated No one remains in the country ; scarcely any inhabitants in the towns ; yet even the poor remains of human kind are still smitten daily and without intermission. Before our eyes some are carried away captive, some mutilated, some murdered. She herself, who once was mistress of the world, we behold how Rome fares ; worn down by manifold and incalculable dis- tresses, the bereavement of citizens, the attack of foes, the reiteration of over- throws, where is her senate? where are her people ? "We, the few survivors, are still the daily prey of the sword and of other innumerable tribulations. Where are they who in a former day reveled in her glory? where is their pomp, their pride, their frequent and immoderate joy ? youngsters, young men of the world, congregated here from every quarter, where they aimed at a secular advancement. Now no one hastens up to her for preferment ; and so it is with other cities also ; some places are laid waste by pestilence, others are de- populated by the sword, others are tormented by famine ; and others are swal- lowed up by earthquakes.' These words, far from being a rhetorical lament are but a meagre statement of some of the circumstances of a desolation, in which the elements them- selves, as St. Gregory intimates, as well as the barbarians, took a principal ^Dart. In the dreadful age of that great Pope, a plague spread from the low- lands of Egypt to the Indies on the one hand, along Africa across to Spain on the other, till, reversing its course, it reached the eastern extremity of Europe, For fifty-two years did it retain possession of the infected atmosphere, and, in Constantinople, during three months, five thousand, and at length ten thousand persons, are said to have died, daily. Many cities of the East were left without inhabitants; and in several districts of Italy there were no laborers to gather either harvest or vintage. A succession of earthquakes accompanied for years this heavy calamity. Constantinople was shaken for above forty days. Two hundred and fifty thousand persons are said to have perished in the earthquake of Antiooh. crowded, as the city was, with strangers for the festival of the Ascension. Berytus, the eastern school of Roman jurisprudence, called, from its literary and scientific importance, the eye of Phoenicia, shared a similar fate. These, however, were but local visitations Cities are indeed the homes of civilization, but the wide earth, with her hill and dale, open plain and winding valley, is its refuge. THE HIERONYMIANS. FROM THE GERMAN OP KARL VON RAUMER. [Translated by L. W. Fitch.} BEFORE Italy had begun to exert any influence upon German culture, there existed in the Netherlands an order called the brotherhood of the Hieronymians. Its founder was Gerard Groote, better known as Gerard the Great, who was born in the year 1340, at Deventer. From 1355 to 1358, he pursued his studies at Paris, where, in addition to the ordi- nary branches, he gave his attention to the unhallowed arts of magic, astrology, and necromancy. But, during a dangerous illness, he sent for a priest and gave him all his books, pertaining to these arts, to burn. On his return from Paris he was chosen a canon, both in Aix- la-Chapelle and Cologne ; and, in the latter place, he taught scholastic philosophy and theology, and lived respectably but not in extravagance. Once, while diverting himself with looking at certain games, a person accosted him thus : " Do not waste your time upon these vanities : but change your course and become a different man." Soon after he entered Monikhausen, a Carthusian monastery at Arnheim, the prior of which had been his father-confessor at Paris. Here for three years, he led a life of penitence and self-mortification, studying the Holy Scriptures before all other books. He then began his career as a preacher, and, as Thomas -a- Kempis relates, he preached in the spirit and the power of John the Baptist. No church was large enough to hold the throngs that flocked to hear him ; and he often held his audience spell-bound for three hours together. The impres- sion that he made was the greater, inasmuch as he did not speak in unintelligible Latin, but in his native Belgian. But these sermons of his drew upon him the wrath of the begging friars, whose profligate life he had exposed ; and the Bishop of Utrecht, at their instance, interdicted him from preaching. In the year 1367 he, with John Cole, Rector of Zwoll, paid a visit to the venerable octogenarian mystic, Ruysbroeck, prior of the monastery of Grunthal, near Brussels. Ruysbroeck made a profound impression upon him, as he had done upon Tauler before him, and he was specially edified by the pious and benignant demeanor which the old man observed toward the brethren under his charge. Returning to Deventer, he gathered around him a circle, chiefly 46 THE HIERONYMIANS. composed of students from the seat of learning at that place, with whom he read good books. These all, while with him, earned their livelihood principally by copying ; for he forbade them to beg. About this time Florentius Radewin filled the office of canon at Utrecht. He was born in 1350, at Leerdam, in South Holland, and had studied at Prague. When he heard of Gerard's influential career at Deventer, he gave up his canonicate, became vicar of the church of St. Lebuin in Deventer, and an intimate friend of Gerard. One day he addressed Gerard as follows : "Dear master, where would be the harm, should I and those clerkly priests of yours, those brethren of a good will, (bonce voluntatis,} form a common fund of the moneys that we have hitherto weekly expended, and live in common, (in communi?") Gerard replied: "The begging friars would set them- selves against us with every resource in their power." But, when Florentius urged the point, saying, " It can do no harm to begin ; per- haps God will crown the undertaking with success," Gerard yielded, adding the promise that he would take immediate measures to carry out the plan. Such was the origin of that fraternity, which, taking its name from the words of Florentius, was known as the " brotherhood of good will," or the " brotherhood of a common life." They were also called, from Hieronymus and Gregory the Great, both of whom they regarded as patrons, Hieronymians and Gregorians. Their first house, fratrum domus so-called, was erected about the year 1384, at Deventer. There these brethren lived together; and, by the end of the fifteenth century, a chain of such houses had extended from Cambray in the Netherlands, through the whole of Northern Germany, to Culm in West Prussia ; from the Scheldt to the Vistula. And all this was the blessed fruit of Radewin's inspired suggestion. Gerard only survived to witness the first beginnings of the institu- tion : he died in 1384 of the plague. Dying, he appointed Florentius his successor, for he could choose none worthier. His last words were these : " Behold, the Lord is calling me ; the hour of my redemption is close at hand : Augustine and Bernard are waiting at the door." Thomas-a-Kempis depicts Gerard as a man, who worked out the salvation of his soul with the same severe asceticism that had charac- terized Augustine and Bernard. He denied himself every worldly pleasure, even the most innocent, wore coarse garments, ate his food burnt and unsalted, and avoided all female society. His views of knowledge, I give in his own words. " Make the gos- pels, first of all, the root of all your studies and the mirror of your life, for in them is portrayed the character of Christ ; then the lives and THE HIERONYMIAN8. ^ opinions of the fathers, the acts and deeds of the apostles, and tne Epistles of St. Paul, to which you may add the devotional works oi Bernard, Anselm, Augustine," &c. His curriculum of study was accordingly contracted within very narrow limits. "Spend no time," he continues, " either on geometry arithmetic, rhetoric, logic, grammar, poetry or judicial astrology. All these branches Seneca rejects : how much more, then, should a spiritually-minded Christian pass them by, since they subserve in no respect the life of faith ! Of the sciences of the pagans, their ethics may not be so scrupulously shunned, since these were the special field of the wiser among them, as Socrates and Plato. That which does not better a man, or at least does not reclaim him from evil, is positively hurtful. Neither ought we to read pagan books, nor the Holy Scriptures, to penetrate into the mysteries of nature by the means." All literary fame, and the gloss and show of learning alike, Gerard utterly despised. He evidently prized those things alone, which promoted holiness ; and all that did not work for this result, even were it speculative theology, (dogmatics,) to say nothing of other sciences and the arts, he thrust into the back -ground. With such sentiments, the higher studies of course found no favor in his eyes; but, on the other hand, he devoted himself with zeal to the cause of popular education. Let us now return to Florentine and his brotherly unions. In the ascetic severity of his character, he resembled Gerard, though consti- tutionally he was more cheerful, and endowed with more practical abilities. By the power of the purest and the most unselfish love, he exerted a wonderful influence over those with whom he had to do, and especially over his disciples, who revered and loved him. Says Thomas- a-Kempis, "he was filled with all spiritual wisdom, and a knowledge of God in Christ. And though he survived Gerard but fifteen years, yet in this brief time he founded many brotherly unions." The establishment at Deventer, over which he himself presided, was, according to Thomas, modeled upon the humility of the apostles, and formed a mirror of piety, all the brethren being of one heart and one mind, self-denying, devout and full of mercy. With regard to the in- ternal economy of these houses or unions, the number of the brethren thus living together was about twenty, and they had a common table and purse. Each house usually had four officiating priests, while the rest of the inmates were either students of divinity or laymen. The students wer similar to monks, yet with this difference, that they dis- pensed with all strict rules and inexorable vows. The brethren were industrious, maintaining themselves by handicrafts, especially by 48 THE HIERONYMlAWe. copying. And, on the invention of printing, it was the Hieronymiana at Gouda who set the first types in Holland. Pursuant to the injunctions of Gerard, Florentius founded, in the year 1386, at Windesheim, near Gouda, a monastery of regular canons? u which, both for counsel and for action, should be a rallying point for the entire ' Union of the Common Life.'" This was soon followed by the establishment of another on Mount St. Agnes, at Zwoll ; and, by the year 1430, there were forty-five such monasteries in existence. Their inmates became most industrious copyists, and they would appear at times to have carried their occupation to excess. And because many of them, through too great abstinence, became crazed, the question was put to new applicants at the monastery of Windesheim, " Do you eat and sleep well, and do you obey with alacrity ? " for on these three points their perseverance \n piety was thought to depend.* After a blissful life, such as falls to the lot of few, Florentius died in the year 1400, at the age of fifty years. After him and Gerard the Great, a third person exerted a vast influence among the Hieronymians. This was Gerard Zerbolt, com- monly styled, from the place of his birth, Gerard of Zutphen. He was born in the year 1367. His unremitting efforts were given to the cause of the " diffusion and the use of the Bible in the vernacular, as well as the employment of this, (i. e., the vernacular,) on all relig- ious and ecclesiastical occasions." He wrote a book called "De libris Teutonicalibus," in which he expressly insists that the laity should read the Bible in their native tongue. "The books of the Holy Scriptures," he says, " were originally composed in the native tongue of those for whom they were immediately designed ; and for all others they should be translated. And the Vulgate version was in Latin for this reason alone, namely, that, when it was made, the Latin tongue was spoken over the whole of the great Roman empire And the Holy Spirit conferred the gift of tongues upon the apostles, in order that they might be enabled to preach to all the different na- tions in their different languages." And he closes by quoting, from the most distinguished fathers of the church, expressions confirmatory of his own views. Prayer likewise, he contended, should be offered in the native tongue of the petitioner. So ceaseless and unresting were his labors, that his early death, in the year 1398, when he was but thirty-one years of age, is to be traced directly to over-much study. We should also speak in this connection of a man, whose name has penetrated into all the world ; and that man is Thomas-a-Kempis. * Delprat and TJlman both quote this question, but without the motive annexed, and base upon it the charge of epicureanism. But the " Lives " of Thomas-a-Kempis leave no room to doubt of the excessive abstinence of the monks. THE HIERONYMIANS. 49 Born in 1380, at thirteen he entered the school of Deventer, and there became known to Florentius, who aided him in many ways and that right heartily. Seven years after, or in 1400, he joined the Mount St. Agnes monastery, above mentioned, and there for the long period of seventy -one years he passed a serene and contemplative life, dying, in 1472, at the age of ninety-two years. Thomas has sketched for us the lives of both the Gerards, of Florentius, and of many other distinguished Hieronymians likewise, besides composing many devo- tional books. One of these latter, the " Imitation of Christ," has been read more than any other book of devotion in the world. It has been translated into very many different languages ; the Latin original has passed through more than 2000 editions, the French translation, more than 1000.* The hostile machinations of the begging friars, which Gerard the Great experienced, followed the Hieronymians after his death. Gra- bow, a Saxon Dominican, brought a most insidious accusation against them before Pope Martin V., and was thereby instrumental in placing them under ban. But Chancellor John Gerson pronounced a decis- ion at the Council of Constance against this accusation, as follows, namely : " that the accusatory document, since it was heretical, should be committed to the flames." And accordingly Grabow was com- pelled to retract his charge. Thus the Hieronymians obtained a formal recognition both from Pope and Council ; for a Bull of Pope Eugene IV., in 1437, and a second of Sixtus IV., in 1474, invested them with full privileges, and Pius II. likewise shewed himself favora- ble to them. In the year 1505 the last union, that at Cambray, was established. The greatest efficiency of the brotherhood dates in the 16th century. As the Reformation was inaugurated, many of their number gave in their adhesion to it ; and, on the other hand, the Jesuits gradually absorbed many of their establishments. After this cursory glance at the brotherhood and its founders, let us examine its educational efficiency. For, because of their activity in promoting education, the brethren were also called the *' scholarly fraternity," "fratres scholares" And yet it is not an easy task to characterize this activity, for it bore a very different impress according to times and circumstances. * There has been much controversy as to whether Thomas a-Kempis were really its author Delprat mentions one hundred and twenty-seven different treatises adverse to his claim. But Ulman decides in his favor on sufficiently weighty grounds. The " Imitatio Christi " was translated into Latin by Castellio, the same who translated the Vulgate into Latin. " This lit- tle book," says Castellio, " I have deemed worthy to be turned from Latin into Latin, that is from a rustic dialect into more elegant and polished language." 4 ~Q THE HIERONYMIANS. The view which Gerard the Great took of knowledge we have already seen. It was the view of a man, who, satiated with scholastic studies, burned his books of magic also, thus bidding a final adieu to all unprofitable sciences, to strive alone after the one thing needful. If he had before toilsomely pursued shadowy theories, he now so much the more applied his whole soul to the substantial and the practical, resolutely refraining from all knowledge except that which had a direct bearing upon a holy life. With him, the pious, contemplative Thomas-a-Keni pis fully coin- cided. Such expressions as the following abound in the writings of the latter : " Cease from an inordinate desire for knowledge, for this brings great perplexity and delusion with it. Learned men crave the notice of the world, and wish to be accounted wise. But there is much knowledge which adds little or nothing to the welfare of the soul. And that man is surely most foolish, who strives after any thing which does not advance his own supreme good." With these sentiments, he applied himself, as we might naturally expect, principally to the study of the Bible. So also did the two Gerards. And these men were all prompted by their love for souls to use every energy to make the book of salvation accessible to the un- learned. Gerard of Zutphen, especially, was untiring in his endeavors to give the people a Bible that they could read. And this is the beginning and the foundation of a Christian popular education. If you give the Bible to the people, they must learn to read it, and writing is linked to reading, following close upon its footsteps. The germ that began to sprout here, sprang up, in the Reformation, into a broad and vigorous growth. The Hieronymians devoted themselves, . however, not merely to popular instruction, but to the higher branches of learning. This we may gather with certainty from the fact that distinguished scholars were formed in their schools. It is nevertheless hard to decide what schools we are to regard as theirs. For in some places the brethren themselves were principals, superintending every department of instruction ; in others again, they gave assistance in schools already existing, teaching in a subordinate capacity, but yet taking much interest in the scholars. In the houses of the brethren, reading, writing, singing, and Latin conversation and declamation were taught; and there would appear to have been boarding-scholars at all of them. In the house at Deventer, Latin speaking was carried to such an extent, that a penalty was laid upon the scholar who should utter, even through a slip of the tongue, a word of Dutch. Yet the style of Latin which they aimed THE HIERONYMIANS. - ^ to impart was mediaeval and barbarous, such as the clergy were then accustomed to employ. The Latinity of the early Hieronymians, and even that of Thomas- a-Kempis, was very far from classical. But a new era dawned upon these schools, when the Italians exerted a direct influence upon them through such of the Netherlanders and Germans as had in part been molded in them, and had afterward visited Italy. How wide a difference there was between the Hieronymians in their earlier years and the Italians of the 14th and 15th centuries, we need but a hasty comparison to determine. Those as truly as these re- jected the divinity of the schools ; but how diverse their motives ! For the Italians, fascinated by the beauties, the poetry and the elo- quence of the pagan classics, conceived an aversion for the hideous jargon of the school-dialecticians, even when these were Christian. The Hieronymians, on the other hand, turned away from scholasticism, because it did not profit them ; nay more, because it stood directly in the way of all earnest self-consecration, and the salvation of souls. And hence it was, that they pursued with so much eagerness the study of the Bible, while the Italians scarce gave so much as a thought to it. And still less did these latter think of circulating the Bible, or of promoting popular education, which cause was so dear to the breth- ren ; but when, like Guarino and Vittorino di Feltre, they turned their thoughts to education, they devoted themselves chiefly to the instruc- tion of princes or nobles. But when a love for the classics was awakened among the Germans and Netherlanders, they still preserved the Christian element, as the ground of all mental culture and instruction, and despite their admi- ration of pagan authors, that pagan bias, (paganitas,) which Erasmus reproves in the Italians, was ever an abomination to them. " Thomas-a-Kempis is to be regarded as the flower of the ascetic piety which the institution of the * Common Life ' fostered ; Agricola, Alexander Hegius, and, if you will, Erasmus also, of its philosophic learning ; and Wessel, of its theological science." 52 HI ERONYMIANS REVIVAL OF LETTERS. In process of time the Brethren of Common Life spread over Flanders, France, and Germany, and the schools they founded multiplied and flourished. They were introduced into the University of Paris by John ^tandonch, a doctor of the Sorbonne, who gave into their direction the college de Montaigu, of which he was their principal, and established them in Cambray, Valenciennes, Mech- lin, and Louvain. He drew up statutes for their use, which are supposed by Du Boulay to have furnished St. Ignatius with the first notions of his rule, an idea which receives some corroboration from the fact that the saint studied at the college de Montaigu during his residence at the University of Paris. Stan- donch himself received the habit o'f the Poor Clerks, as they were now often called, and had the satisfaction of seeing more than 300 good scholars issue from his schools, many of whom undertook the direction or reform of other academic*. In 1430 the Institute numbered forty-five houses, and thirty years later the numbers were increased threefold. The Deventer brethren were far from being mere mystics and transcribers of books. The aim of their founda- tion was doubtless to supply a system of education which should revive some- thing of the old monastic discipline, but they cultivated all the higher branches of learning, and their schools were among the first of those north of the Alps, which introduced the revived study of classical literature. One of their most illustrious scholars was Nicholas of Cusa, or Cusanus, the son of a poor fisher- man, who won his doctor's cap at Padua, and became renowned for his Greek, Hebrew, and mathematical learning. Eugenius IV. appointed him his legate, and Nicholas V. created him cardinal, and bishop of Brixen, in the Tyrol. His personal character won him the veneration of his people, but, according to Ten- nemann, his love of mathematics led him into many theological extravagances. He was strongly inclined to the views of the Neo-Platonists ; he considered, moreover, that all human knowledge was contained in the ideas of numbers, and attempted to explain the mysteiy of the Holy Trinity on mathematical prin- ciples. He was undoubtedly a distinguished man of science, and was the first among moderns to revive the Pythagorean hypothesis of the motion of the earth round the sun. Cusanus had studied at most of the great universities, but held none of them in great esteem, for he professed a sovereign contempt for the scholastic philosophy which still held its ground in those academies. At his death he left his wealth to a hospital which he had founded in his native village, and to which he attached a magnificent library. Deventer could boast indeed of being the fruitful mother of great scholars, such as Hegius, Langius, and Dringeberg, all of whom afterwards took part in the restoration of letters. The Brethren, moreover, displayed extraordinary zeal in promoting the new art of printing, and one of the earliest Flemish presses was set up in their col- lege. And in 1475, when Alexander Hegius became rector of the schools, he made the first bold experiment of printing Greek. It is not to be supposed that such a revolution as that which was brought about in the world of letters by the new invention could fail of producing events of a mixed character of good and evil. Whatever was fermenting in the minds of the people now found expres- sion through the press, and Hallam notices ' the incredible host of popular relig- ious tracts poured forth ' before the close of the fifteenth century, most of them of a character hostile to the faith. The first censorship of printed books ap- pears to have been established in 1480, by Berthold, archbishop of Mentz. who explained his reasons for taking this step in a mandate, wherein he complains of the abuse of the ' divine art ' of printing, whereby perverse men have turned HIERONYMIANS REVIYAL OF LETTERS. 53 that to the injury of mankind which was designed for their instruction. Spe- cially he alludes to those unauthorized and faulty translations into the vulgar tongue of the Scriptures, and even the canons of the Church, wherein men of no learning or experience have taken on them to invent new words or use old ones in erroneous senses, in order to express the meaning of the original, 'a thing most dangerous in the sacred Scriptures/ He therefore forbids any such translations to be thenceforward published without being approved by four doctors, under pain of excommunication, desiring that the art which was first of all discovered in this city, ' not without divine aid/ should be maintained in all its honour. This mandate- was only directed against the faulty translations of the Holy Scriptures. No opposition was offered to the multiplication of correct versions, both of the Latin Vulgate, and its various translations. The Cologne Bible, printed in 1479, had before this appeared, with the formal approbation of the university. The very first book printed by Gutenburg and Faust in 1453, was the Latin Bible, and among the twenty-four books printed in Germany be- fore the year 1470 we find five Latin and two German editions of the Bible. Translations of the Holy Scriptures into variotfs tongues were among the very first books issued from the press; as the Bohemian version in 1475, the Italian in 1471 which ran through eleven editions before the close of the century, the Dutch in 1477, and the French in the same year. The admirers of Luther have therefore fallen into a strange error, when they represent him as the first to unlock the Scriptures to the people, for twenty-four editions of the German Bible alone had been printed and published before his time. It was in the year 1476 that a little choir-boy of Utrecht entered the college of Deventer, and gave such signs of genius and industry as to draw from his masters the prediction that he would one day be the light of his age. He was a namesake of the founder, but, after the fashion of the day, adopted a Latin and Greek version of his Flemish name of Gerard, and was to be known to posterity as Desiderius Erasmus. Like Thomas a Kempis, he passed from the schools of Deventer to the cloisters of the canons regular, a step which, he assures us, was forced on him by his guardians, and never had his own assent. A happy acci- dent enabled him to visit Rome in the suite of the Bishop of Cambray ; and, once released from the wearisome discipline of convent life, he never returned to it, but spent the rest of his life wandering from one to another of the capitals of France, Italy, and England, teaching for a livelihood, courted by all the literary and religious parties of the day, and satirising them all by turns ; indisputably the literary Coryphaeus of his age, but penetrated through and through with its scoffing and presumptuous spirit. It was an age fruitful in pedants and human- ists, whose destiny it was to help on the revolution in Faith by a revolution in letters. Schools and professors multiplied throughout Germany. At the very time when Hegius was teaching the elements of Greek to Erasmus, his old com- rades Langius and Dringeberg were presiding over the schools of Munster and Schelstadt. Rodolph Langius exerted himself strenuously in the cause of polite letters, and whilst superintending his classes occupied spare moments in correct- ing the text of almost every Latin work which at that time issued from the press, and in making deadly war on the scholastic philosophy. His rejection of the old-fashioned school-books and his innovations on time-honoured abuses raised against him the friars of Cologne, and a controversy ensued in which Langiui won so much success as enabled him to fix the stigma of barbarism on 54 KIERONYMIANS REVIVAL OF LETTERS. his opponents. His friend and namesake Rodolph Agricola, who had studied a? Ferrara under Theodore of Gaza, and was held by his admirers superior in eru- dition to Tolitian himself, at this time presided over the school of Groningen. Besides his skill in the learned tongues he was a poet, a painter, a musician, an orator, and a philosopher. Such a multitude of accomplishments won him an invitation to the court of the Elector Palatine at Heidelberg, where a certain learned academy had been founded, called the Rhenish Society, for the encour- agement of Greek and Hebrew literature, the members of which, says Ilallam, 'did not scorn to relax their minds with feasting and dancing, not forgetting the ancient German attachment to the flowing cup.' This is a polite way of ren- dering a very ugly passage, which in the original tells us plainly that the Rhe- nish academicians were addicted to excessive inebriety and other disgraceful vices. It is somewhat remarkable, however, that Agricola, who died three years after his removal to Heidelberg, received on his death-bed the habit of those very friars whom, during life, he and his friend Langius had done their best to hold up to popular contempt. About the same time Reuchlin was studying at Paris, where, in 1458, Greg- ory of Tiferno had been appointed Greek professor. Reuchlin visited Rome, and translated a passage from Thucydides, in the presence of Argyrophilus, with such success that the Greek exclaimed, in a transport of delight (and pos- sibly of surprise, at such an achievement on the part of a Northern barbarian), ' our banished Greece has flown beyond the Alps ! ' Reuchlin was a Hebrew scholar, a circumstance which, in the end, proved his ruin ; for, embracing the Cabalistic philosophy, he abandonded classics and good sense in the pursuit of that absurd mysticism. In this strange infatuation he had many companions. Not a few of those who had shown themselves foremost in deriding the scholas- tic philosophy, ended by substituting in its place either open scepticism or the philosophy of magic. A few years later, the wild theories of Cornelius Agrip- pa, Paracelsus, and Jerome Cardan, found eager adherents among those who conceived it a proof of good scholarship to despise St. Thomas as a Goth. Reuchlin, whilst pouring forth his bitter satires against the old theologians, was printing his treatise on the Cabala, entitled ' De Verbo Mirijico,' wherein magic is declared to be the perfection of philosophy, which work was formally con- demned at Rome. However, all the French savants of the Renaissance were not Cabalists, nor did all, when they introduced the study of Greek, forget that it was the language of the Gospels. The real restoration of Greek studies in France must be ascribed to Budseus, who made up, by the piety and indefatiga- ble studies of his later years, for a youth of wild irregularity. He had studied under Lascaris, and though he had reached a very mature age before he devoted himself to letters, he soon became as familiar with the learned tongues as with his native idiom. His treatise on the Ancient Money first rendered his name fa- mous, and secured him the friendship of Francis I. He profited from the favor shown him by that monarch, to solicit from him the foundation of the Royal College of France, for the cultivation of the three learned tongues, and thus fairly introduced the ' Cecropian Muse' into the University of Paris. If we may credit the authority of a grave rector of that university, this momentous change was advantageous, not merely to the minds, but also to the morals of her students. St. Jerome, as we know, imposed upon himself the study of Hebrew as an efficacious means of taming the passions; and Rollin affirms that, many who, in former years, had been nothing but idle men of pleasure, when HIERONYMIANS REVIVAL OF LETTER*. 55 once they began to read the Greek authors flung their vices and follies to the winds, and led the simple and austere manner of life that becomes a scholar. He quotes a passage from the manuscript Memoirs of Henry de Mesmes, which gives a pleasant picture of the college life of those days, and may be taken as an example of the sort of labour imposed on a hard-working law student of the sixteenth century : ' My father gave me for a tutor John Maludan of Limoges, a pupil of the learned Durat, who was chosen for the innocence of his life and his suitable age to preside over my early years, till I should be old enough to govern myself. With him and my brother, John James de Mesmes, 1 was sent to the college of Burgundy, and was put into the third class, and I afterwards spent almost a year in the first. My father said he had two motives for thus sending me to the college : the one was the cheerful and innocent conversation of the boys, and the other was the school discipline, bv which he trusted that we should be weaned from the over-fondness that had been shown us at home, and purified, as it were, in fresh water. Those eighteen months I passed at college were of great service to me. I learnt to recite, to dispute, and to sj.eak in public ; and I be- came acquainted with several excellent men, many of whom are still living. I learned, moreover, the frugality of the scholar's li'fe, and how to portion out my day to advantage ; so that, by the time I left, I had repeated in public abundance of Latin, and two thousand Greek verses, which I had written after the fashion of boys of my age, and I could repeat Homer from one end to the other. I was thus well received by the chief men of my time, to some of whom my tutor in- troduced me. In 1545, I was sent to Toulouse with my tutor and brother, to study law under an old grey -haired professor, who had travelled half over the world. There we remained for three years, studying severely, and under such strict rules as I fancy few persons now-a-days would care to comply with. We rose at four, and, having said our prayers, went to lectures at five, with our great books under our arms, and our inkhorns and candlesticks in our hands. We at- tended all the lectures until ten o'clock, without intermission ; then we went to dinner, after having hastily collated during half an hour what our master had written down. After dinner, by way of diversion, we read Sophocles, or Aristo- phanes, or Euripides, and sometimes Demosthenes, Tully, Virgil, and Horace. At one, we were at our studies again, returning home at five to repeat and turn to the places quoted in our books, till past six. Then came supper, after which we read some Greek or Latin author. On feast days we heard mass and vespers, and the rest of the day we were allowed a little music and walking. Sometimes we went to see our friends, who invited us much oftener than we were permitted to go. The rest of the day we spent in reading, and we generally had with us some learned men of that time/ We have the satisfaction of knowing that the frugal and laborious training of Henry's early life was the means of forming a manly and Christian character. Nor is the portrait less pleasing which the biographer of Budseus has left us of the domestic life of that great man, who, though he had visited the court of Leo X., in quality of ambassador of France, and was the chief lion of the French world of letters, retained to his dying day those simple tastes and habits, which we are assured resulted from no affectation of laconic manners, but a certain genuine sentiment of humility. His secretary and constant fellow-labourer was his wife, who sat in his study, found out passages in his books of reference, cop- ied his papers, and withal did not forget his domestic comfort. Budeeus needed some such good angel by his side, for he belonged to that class of scholars who are more familiar with the Latin As than with the value of louis d'ors. His mind was in his books, and whilst busy with the doings of the Greeks and Ro- mans he could not always call home his absent thoughts. It is to be regretted, that with a character in many respects so amiable, Budaeus should have permit- ted his love of Greek to lead him to take p?.rc with the Humanists in the ferocious onslaughts which they directed against the adherents of the mediaeval learning. EMINENT TEACHERS IN THE NETHERLANDS, PRIOR TO 1500. FROM THE GERMAN OP KARL VON RAUMER. [Translated by L. W. Fitch] JOHN WESSEL. JOHN WESSEL was a baker's son, and was born in 1420, at Groningen. Here he received his early education, after which he went to Zwoll, to the school of the Hieronymians, where Thomas-a-Kempis exerted a powerful influence upon him. He then studied in Cologne, and about the year 1452 went to Paris, where he made the acquaintance of Bessarion and Francis de Novera, afterward Pope Sixtus IV. In 1470 he made a journey to Italy. Already won over to Platonism by Bessarion, his stay in Florence wedded him more closely to it. When in Rome, Pope Sixtus IV. bade him ask a favor of him, and Wessel accordingly besought him for a Greek and a Hebrew Bible from the Vatican Library. Returning to Paris in 1473, Reuchlin, then 18 years old, made his acquaintance, and he appears to have given a great impetus to the philosophical and humanistic studies of Reuchlin. His fellow-countryman, Agricola, was likewise with him at Paris ; and was persuaded by Wessel to the study of the Hebrew. In his later years he returned to his native country, and lived at times in the Mount St. Agnes Monastery, at Zwoll, where Thomas-a- Kempis also passed his long and peaceful life. He spent likewise much time in the monastery Edward, or Edouard, two hours distance from Groningen, and in a convent at Groningen. He died a peaceful death on the 4th of October, 1489, in his 69th year, and was buried in that Groningen convent. His contemporaries called him u Lux mundi" also " Magister con- troversiarum /" the last epithet he owed to his many philosophical and theological discussions. His philosophy was originally realism , but later he became a nominalist, as were all the reformers with the exception of Huss. His theological abilities were recognized by Luther. " Plad I known Wessel or read his books earlier," says Luther, "my adversaries would have fancied that I had obtained this thing or that from Wes- sel ; so much do our sentiments harmonize. It gives me peculiar joy and strength, and removes every doubt that I might have had of the soundness of my doctrine, to find that he agrees everywhere with me, JOHN WESSEL. ~ 7 o * both in thought and opinion, expressing himself frequently even in the same words, though at a different era, when another air was over us, and another wind blew, and he too was accustomed to another fashion and to other junctures." In another place Luther says : "Wessel manages matters with great moderation and truth." On this account it was that Erasmus, who so dearly loved and prized peace, thus writes : " Wessel has much in common with Luther; but in how much more modest and Christian a manner he conducts himself than do they, or most of them !" Besides Latin, Wessel understood both Greek and Hebrew. The nar- row limits of learning, as we find them laid down by the earlier Hierony- mians, Wessel far exceeded. His long residence at Paris, and the journey to Italy, had widened his intellectual horizon ; for it was only after a busy, active life in foreign lands, that a longing was created in his breast for his own land, and for the contemplative quiet that could be alone secured by a return among his kindred. Greek he learned from Bessarion and other Greek scholars in Italy ; but who taught him Hebrew we are nowhere informed. His clearness of thought especially qualified him to teach. " The scholar," he says, " is known bv his ability to teach." His instructive intercourse appears to have had a very marked in- fluence on many, as we have seen that it did on Reuchlin and Agri- cola. Especially must the frequent converse of many distinguished men with the aged Wessel, as in the monastery of Edward, have been very edifying, both in a literary and in a religious aspect. Goswin of Halen, earlier, Wcssel's scholar, and, at the close of the 15th and the commencement of the 16th century, head of the broth- erly union at Groningen, writes of this converse to a friend as follows : " I have known Edward for more than forty years ; but then it was less a monastery than a college. Of this, could Rudolph Agricola and Wessel bear me witness, if they were now living, as also Rudolph Lange, of Munster, Alexander Hegius, and others, who all have passed whole weeks, yea, whole months at Edward, to hear and to learn, and to become daily more learned and better." " To become better," says Goswin, for the earnestness of a Christian morality animated all the studies of Wessel, a depth of thought which was radically opposed to the aesthetic pleasurableness of so many Italians. And this was why he studied, as well as he was able to do, the Old Testament in the original. We can not better present to our view the love and the well-directed labors of Wessel, than in these words of his own : " Knowledge is not our highest aim. for he who only knows how to know, is a fool ; 58 JOHN WESSEL. for lie has no taste of the fruit of knowledge, nor does he understand how Lo order his knowledge with wisdom. The knowledge of truth is its own glorious fruit, when it meets with a wise husbandman ; for by this truth he may, out of his clear knowledge, come to God, and become God's friend ; since through knowledge he unites himself to God, and progresses step by step in this union, until he tastes how gracious the Lord is, and through this taste becomes more desirous, yea, burns with desire, and amid this glow God loves him and lives in him, until he becomes wholly one with God. This is the true, pure, earnest fruit of an earnest knowledge, which in very truth all men by nature do rather desire to possess than mere memory, that is to say, than knowledge, in and for itself. For, as unsettled and wavering opinions are empty without knowledge, so knowledge is unfruitful without love." To this brief sketch of Wessel I add a passage from Goswin. It gives us a view of the nature of the studies that men and youth in Wessel's vicinity were accustomed to pursue at Zwoll, Edward, and other famous schools of that period, and likewise what writings people, molded by such influences, would chiefly read and prize. " You may read Ovid," Goswin remarks, " and writers of that stamp through, once ; but Virgil, Horace, and Terence are to be studied with more attention, and oftener, because in our profession we need to bestow especial study upon the poets. But, above all, I will that you read the Bible constantly. And, since one ought not to remain in ignorance of his- tory, I counsel you to take up Josephus, and for church history to read the Tripartita* Of the profane writers, Plutarch, Sal lust, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Justin, will especially profit you. Then it will do you no harm to go through with the writings of Plato and Aristotle. But with Cicero we must remain longer, in order that we may acquire a truly Roman style. Next to our Bible it is well to give thorough and earnest study to Augustine. Him you may follow up by Jerome, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Gregory, Bernard, and Hugo St. Victor, a man full of rich instruction." This passage shows how much the circle of study of the Hierony- mians had become enlarged during the 15th century. This we owe to the influence which the Italians had over Wessel, Agricola, Rudolph Lange, and others, who again in their turn shaped with such power both German and Netherland culture. But the Bible remained to these thoughtful men the Book of books ; neither were the Fathers thrust aside. * This was a sketch of the history of the church taken from Socrates, Theodoret, and *3ozemenes, translated into Latin by Caesiodore. RUDOLF AGR1COLA. 59 RUDOLF AGRICOLA. RUDOLF AGRICOLA was born at Baflo, near Groningen, in West Friesland, in 1443. His proper name was Husmann. It is not known, where he received his earliest instruction. He studied at the University of Louvain, where he read Cicero and Quintilian chiefly, and after an honorable career, became a Magister artium. His inter- course with Frenchmen while at Louvain, was the means of teaching him the French language. From Louvain, he proceeded to Paris, where he had John Wessel, among others, for a teacher. In 1576, he went to Ferrara. There he studied the ancients under Theodore Gaza and Guarini, copied with great diligence manuscripts, Quintilian among the rest, and won the applause of the Italians by his Latin speeches and poems, as well as by his accomplished singing to the guitar. He delivered an ora- tion there in the praise of philosophy, before Hercules de'Este. There too commenced his friendship for Dalberg, afterward Bishop of Worms, and Diedrich Plenningen, whom he was wont to call his Pliny. Returning to Germany, he tarried six months of the year 1481 in Brussels, at the court of the then arch-duke, afterward emperor, Maxi- milian I.,'on the behalf of the city Groningen. But it was in vain that he was urged to remain at Maximilian's court ; for his repug- nance to all manner of constraint was too great to admit of his accepting the proposal. In the following year, 1482, his friend Barbirianus, invited him to Antwerp, to superintend a school, and likewise to give lectures to amateurs. Agricola replied; " that his friend Plenningen, had, in Dalberg's name, urged him in a most polite letter to go to Heidelberg, and he had accordingly made the long journey from Holland thither. Dalberg, who was soon after chosen bishop of Worms, and other friends, had pressed him to stay at Heidelberg, saying, that he would exercise an advantageous influence upon the studies there, and would have many hearers. Philip, the count Palatine, had also overloaded him with kindness. And Dal- berg had oft'ered him his house, to regard as his own, to come and go at his pleasure. In view of all this, he had as good as pledged him- self, but had taken a journey home first to make the needful arrange- ments. And now on his return he had received this invitation (of Barbarianus) at Bacharach ; and it had caused him much perplexity, to relieve which, he had consulted with friends at Cologne. The re suit of their joint deliberations was, that he could not go to Antwerp, 60 RUDOLF AGRICOLA. because he was already as good as pledged to Heidelberg." In refer- ence to the nature of the Antwerp offer, he expresses himself thus : A school to be given to him ? That would be a hard and an irksome office. A school was like a prison, where scourging, weeping and howling alternated with each other forever. If there is any thing in the world, whose name is directly opposite to its nature, it is a school. The Greeks called it schola, leisure ; the Latins, Indus literarius, the game of letters ; when nothing is further from leisure, nothing harsher and more antagonistic to all playfulness. A far more appropriate name was given to it by Aristophanes; viz., " Qpovriarfipiov," the place of cares. /conduct a school ? What time would be left me for study ; what repose, for invention and production ? Where should I find one or two hours daily for the interpretation of an author? The boys would claim the larger portion of my time, besides wearing my patience to that degree, that whatever leisure time I could secure would be required, not for study, but rather to catch my breath and to compose my thoughts. You say " that with a less rigid discharge of my duties, I might lead a'more agreeable life." I might indeed; but, were I neglectful, which of my colleagues would be assiduous, which of them would not rather, after my example, take his ease ? I think, that a wise man should first carefully consider, whether he should undertake a thing or no ; but when once he does undertake it, then he ought to exert every effort to perform it conscientiously. You say, that I can devote one or two hours a day to lecturing on some classical author before the nobility ; but I would have no leisure for this, since the freshest and best part of every day must be given to the boys, even to weariness. And such lectures meet with discouragements and drawbacks, as I know from experi- ence. In the first glow of zeal many take hold of them ; later, when the zeal is cold, some plead off on the pretext of business, others from the re-action of en- thusiasm become disgusted, and others again are led to stay away, if for no other reason, because their neighbors do. One finds it too much trouble, another, too great an expense. So it comes about, that of a large audience, scarce four or five shall remain with you through the course. It might appear, that a man who had not the smallest inclination to teach either old or young, would not deserve mention in a history of education. But it would be appearance merely. For if Agricola took no pleasure in teaching, himself, yet the prosperity of schools was a matter of deep interest to him. This is evident from parts of this very letter to Barbirianus. He begs him, to persuade the Antwerpers to subject the man, with whom they purposed to intrust the schools, to a conscientious examination beforehand. They should not select a theologian, neither any one of those hair splitting doctors, who imagine that they are competent to speak upon any subject what- ever, while they know nothing, in the first place, of the very art of speaking itself. Such people are as much out of their element in schools, as, according to the Greek proverb, a dog would be in a bath. Much rather ought they to choose a man after the style of Phoenix, the preceptor of Achilles, who should be able both to teach, to speak and to act ; if they could find such an one, they should make sure of him at any price. For their decision was no unim- portant matter, since the destiny of their children depended on it. It was no small thing that they were about to do ; for it pertained to their children, for whose future welfare they themselves in other respects were now toiling and struggling. Their utmost care should be bestowed on that tender age, which, even with the best talents, takes the stamp of good or evil indifferently, accord- ing to the influence brought to bear upon it. In a subsequent letter to Barbirianus, Agricola praises the friendly reception that Dalberg had given him. But on the other hand he RUDOLF AGRICOLA. 61 writes to his brother of his complete unhappiness in the midst of all the prosperity that he enjoyed at Heidelberg. It is hard for me, in advancing age, to learn to serve. And though no ser- vice is required of me, yet I know not whether I am not more greatly burdened, in feeling constrained to impose those duties on myself, which others have re- leased me from. Thus freedom itself exacts a heavy service of me. His love of freedom dissuaded him from wedlock ; or, as he wrote to Reuchlin, it was a shrinking from care, and a dislike to be tied down to an establishment. Of great importance to us are Agricola's letters to his friend, Al- exander Hegius, the famous Rector of Deventer, of whom also we are soon to speak. One of these letters dates from Worms, whither Agricola had gone in the retinue of the Bishop Dalberg. He commences by commend- ing Hegius ; for, as he perceives by his writing, he has improved in his Latinity, (politiorem te, limatioremque fieri.) He showed his let- ter to Dalberg, who joined with himself in wishing Germany joy of such a teacher, exclaiming, " Made virtute, sic itur ad astra" Far- ther on, he laments that studying with the bishop, and public lectures, consume too much of his time. His pupils, with the best inclination, shewed scarce any capacity for study : they were mostly masters, or " Scholastici artium" so called, who squandered all their time upon the sophistical nonsense of the schools, (cavillationes,) and hence found no room for attention to classical studies. " For this reason,"* he adds, u I have undertaken the Hebrew, which is a new and a very difficult labor to me, and which (I could scarce have believed it) gives me much more trouble than did Greek, earlier in life. Yet I am determined to persevere. I have assigned the study of the Holy Scriptures to my later years, provided that my life is spared.'' In a previous letter to Ilegius, in 1480, he accuses himself for in- termitting his studies, and mentions, as the chief cause of his neglect, the fact, that he has no one in Groningen, with whom he can labor in common. Among other matters, he answers some philological questions, which Hegius had submitted to him. He defines the words, mirtius, histrio, persona, scurra, parasilus, nebulo, nepos, ves- per, aurora, tignum, trabs, asser, contignatio. He expresses a doubt whether bonum sero is as good Latin as bonum mane. "As it regards the derivation and formation of new words after the analogies of the language," he says, "I should hardly venture to form a word for which I could not shew classical authority ; yet I might haply have said, 'SocratitasJ 'PlatonitasJ and ' entitasj although our Laurentius Valla disapproves of such words." Farther on Agricola explains For lack of encouragement. RUDOLF AGRICOLA. marks the precise difference between 73 &aXsx