indigent were relieved by his liberality; and his eloquence, which flattery might compare to the voice of Demosthenes or Cicero, was uniformly exerted in the cause of innocence and humanity. Such conspicuous merit was felt and rewarded by a discerning prince; the dignity of Boethius was adorned with the titles of Consul and Patrician, and his talents were usefully employed in the important station of Master of the Offices." work, the various riches of philosoply, poetry, and eloquence, must already have possessed the intrepid calmness which he affected to seek. Suspense, the worst of evils, was at length deter mined by the ministers of death, who executed, and perhaps exceeded, the inhuman mandate of Theodoric. A strong cord was fastened round the head of Boethius, and forcibly tightened, till his eyes almost started from ther sockets; and some mercy may be discovered in the milder torture of beating him with clubs till he expired. But his genius survived to diffuse a ray of knowledge over the darkest ages of the Latin world; the writings of the philosopher were translated by the most glorious of the English kings, and the third Em more honourable tomb the bones of a Catholic saint, who, from his Arian persecutors, had acquired the honours of martyrdom, and the fame of miracles." 128. Boethius was buried in the church of San Pietro di Cieldauro in Pavia. 131. St. Isidore, a learned prelate of Spain, was born in Cartagena, date unknown. In 600 he became Bishop of Seville, and died 636. He was indefatigable in converting the Visigoths from Arianism, wrote many theological and scientific works, and finished the Mosarabic missal and breviary, begun by his brother and predecessor, St. Leander. Being suspected of some participation in a plot against Theodoric, he was confined in the tower of Pavia, where he wrote the work which has immortalized his name. Of this Gibbon speaks as follows: "While Boethius, oppressed with fetters, expected each moment the sentence or the stroke of death, he composed in the tower of Pavia the Consola-peror of the name of Otho removed to a tion of Philosophy; a golden volume not unworthy of the leisure of Plato or Tully, but which claims incomparable merit from the barbarism of the times and the situation of the author. The celestial guide whom he had so long invoked at Rome and Athens now condescended to illumine his dungeon, to revive his courage, and to pour into his wounds her salutary balm. She taught him to compare his long prosperity and his recent distress, and to conceive new hopes from the inconstancy of fortune. Reason had informed him of the precarious condition of her gifts; experience had satisfied him of their real value; he had enjoyed them without guilt; he might resign them without a sigh, and calmly disdain the impotent malice of his enemies, who had left him happiness, since they had left him virtue. From the earth Boethius ascended to heaven in search of the SUPREME GOOD; explored the metaphysical labyrinth of chance and destiny, of prescience and free-will, of time and eternity; and generously attempted to reconcile the perfect attributes of the Deity with the apparent disorders of his moral and physical government. Such topics of consolation, so obvious, so vague, or so abstruse, are ineffectual to subdue the feelings of human nature. Yet the sense of misfortune may be diverted by the labour of thought; and the sage who could artfully combine, in the same "The Venerable Bede," or Beda, an Anglo-Saxon monk, was born at Wearmouth in 672, and in 735 died and was buried in the monastery of Yarrow, where he had been educated and had passed his life. His bones were afterward removed to the Cathedral of Durham, and placed in the same coffin with those of St. Cuthbert. He was the author of more than forty volumes; among which his Ecclesiastical History of England is the most known and valued, and, like the Histories of Orosius, had the honour of being translated by King Alfred from the Latin into Anglo-Saxon. On his death-bed he dictated the close of his translation of the Gospel of John. "Dearest master," said his scribe, is death. ne chapter still remains, but it is ficult for thee to speak." The dying nk replied, "Take thy pen and ite quickly." Later the scribe said, Only one sentence remains ;" and the onk said again, "Write quickly." nd writing, the scribe said, "It is ›ne. "Thou hast said rightly," swered Bede, "it is done; and ed, repeating the Gloria Patri, closing je service of his long life with the osing words of the service of the hurch. The following legend of him from Wright's Biog. Britan. Lit., I. 69: "The reputation of Bede inreased daily, and we find him spoken f by the title of Saint very soon after Boniface in his epistles lescribes him as the lamp of the Church. Towards the ninth century he received the appellation of The Venerable, which has ever since been attached to his name. As a specimen of the fables by which his biography was gradually obscured, we may cite the legends invented to account for the origin of this latter title. According to one, the Anglo-Saxon scholar was on a visit to Rome, and there saw a gate of iron, on which were inscribed the letters P.P.P.S.S.S.R.R.R.F.F.F., which no one was able to interpret. Whilst Bede was attentively considering the inscription, a Roman who was passing by said to him rudely, ‘What seest thou there, English ox?' to which Bede replied, I see your confusion;' and he immediately explained the characters thus: Pater Patria Perditus, Sapientia Secum Sublata, Ruet Regnum Roma, Ferro Flamma Fame. The Romans were astonished at the acuteness of their English visitor, and decreed that the title of Venerable should be thenceforth given to him. According to another story, Bede, having become blind in his old age, was walking abroad with one of his disciples for a guide, when they arrived at an open place where there was a large heap of stones; and Bede's companion persuaded his master to preach to the people who, as he pretended, were assembled there and waiting in great silence and expectation. Bede delivered a most eloquent and moving discourse, and when he had Richard of St. Victor was a monk in the monastery of that name near Paris, "and wrote a book on the Trinity,' says the Ottimo, "and many other beautiful and sublime works"; praise which seems justified by Dante's words, if not suggested by them. Milman, Hist. Latin Christ., VIII. 241, says of him and his brother Hugo: "Richard de St. Victor was at once more logical and more devout, raising higher at once the unassisted power of man, yet with even more supernatural interference,— less ecclesiastical, more religious. Thus the silent, solemn cloister was, as it were, constantly balancing the noisy and pugnacious school. The system of the St. Victors is the contemplative philosophy of deep-thinking minds in their profound seclusion, not of intellectual gladiators: it is that of men following out the train of their own thoughts, not perpetually crossed by the objections of subtle rival disputants. Its end is not victory, but the inward satisfaction of the soul. It is not so much conscious of ecclesiastical restraint, it is rather self-restrained by its inborn reverence; it has no doubt, therefore no fear; it is bold from the inward consciousness of its orthodoxy." 135. As to many other life-weary men, like those mentioned in Purg. XVI. 122 "And late they deem it That God restore them to the better life." 136. "This is Master Sigier," says the Ottimo, "who wrote and lectured on Logic in Paris." Very little more is known of him than this, and that he was supposed to hold some odious, if not heretical opinions. Even his name has perished out of literary history, and survives only in the verse of Dante and the notes of his commentators. 137. The Rue du Fouarre, or Street of Straw, originally called Rue de l'Ecole, is famous among the old streets of Paris, as having been the cradle of the University. It was in early times a hay and straw market, and hence derives its name. In the old poem of Les Rues de Paris, Barbazan, II. 247, are these lines: "Enprès est rue de l'École, Others derive the name from the fact, that the students covered the benches of their lecture-rooms with straw, or used it instead of benches; which they would not have done if a straw-market had not been near at hand. Dante, moved perhaps by some pleasant memory of the past, pays the old scholastic street the tribute of a verse. The elegant Petrarca mentions it frequently in his Latin writings, and always with a sneer. He remembers only "the disputatious city of Paris, and the noisy Street of Straw ; or "the plaudits of the Petit Pont and the Rue du Fouarre, the most famous places on earth." Rabelais speaks of it as the place where Pantagruel first held disputes with the learned doctors, "having posted up his nine thousand seven hundred and sixty-four theses in all the carrefours of the city"; and Ruskin, Mod. Painters, III. 85, justifies the mention of it in Paradise as follows: "A common idealist would have been rather alarmed at the thought of introducing the name of a street in Paris-Straw Street (Rue du Fouarre) into the midst of a description of the highest heavens. .... What did it matter to Dante, up in heaven there, whether the mob below thought him vulgar or not! Sigier had read in Straw Street; that was the fact, and he had to say so, and there an end. "There is, indeed, perhaps, no greater sign of innate and real vulgarity of mind or defective education, than the want of power to understand the universality of the ideal truth; the absence of sympathy with the colossal grasp of those intellects, which have in them so much of divine, that nothing is small to them, and nothing large; but with equal and unoffended vision they take in the sum of the world, Straw Street and the seventh heavens, in the same instant. A certain portion of this divine spirit is visible even in the lower examples of all the true men; it is, indeed, perhaps the clearest test of their belonging to the true and great group, that they are continually touching what to the multitude appear vulgarities. The higher a man stands, the more the word 'vulgar' becomes unintelligible to him." The following sketch from the notebook of a recent traveller shows the Street of Straw in its present condition: "I went yesterday in search of the Rue du Fouarre. I had been hearing William Guizot's lecture on Montaigne, and from the Collége de France went down the Rue St. Jacques, passing at the back of the old church of St. Severin, whose gargoyles still stretch out their long necks over the street. Turning into the Rue Galande, a few steps brought me to the Fouarre. It is a short and narrow street, with a scanty footway on one side, on the other only a gutter. The opening at the farther end is filled by a picturesque vista of the transept_gable and great rose-window of Notre Dame, over the river, with the slender central spire. Some of the houses on either side of the street were evidently of a comparatively modern date; but others were of the oldest, and the sculptured stone wreaths over the doorways, and the remains of artistic iron-work in the balconies, showed them to have been once of some consideration. Some irty children were playing at the door f a shop where fagots and charbon de erre de Paris were sold. A coachman n glazed hat sat asleep on his box before he shop of a blanchisseuse de fin. A woman in a bookbinder's window was olding the sheets of a French grammar. In an angle of the houses under the high Iwall of the hospital garden was a cobbler's stall. A stout, red-faced woman, standing before it, seeing me gazing round, asked if Monsieur was seeking anything in special. I said I was only looking at the old street; it must be very old. 'Yes, one of the oldest in Paris.' 'And why is it called "du Fouarre"?' 'O, that is the old French for foin; and hay used to be sold here. Then, there were famous schools here in the old days; Abelard used to lecture here.' I was delighted to find the traditions of the place still surviving, though I cannot say whether she was right about Abelard, whose name may have become merely typical; it is not improbable, however, that he may have made and annihilated many a man of straw, after the fashion of the doctors of dialectics, in the Fouarre. His house was not far off on the Quai Napoléon in the Cité; and that of the Canon Fulbert on the corner of the Rue Basse des Ursins. Passing through to the Pont au Double, I stopped to look at the books on the parapet, and found a voluminous Dictionnaire Historique, but, oddly enough, it contained neither Sigier's name, nor Abelard's. I asked a ruddy-cheeked boy on a doorstep if he went to school. He said he worked in the day-time, and went to an evening school in the Rue du Fouarre, No. 5. That primary night school seems to be the last feeble descendant of the ancient learning. As to straw, I saw none except a kind of rude straw matting placed round the corner of a wine-shop at the entrance of the street; a sign that oysters are sold within, they being brought to Paris in this kind of matting.' 138. Buti interprets thus: "Lecturing on the Elenchi of Aristotle, to prove Bome truths he formed certain syllogisms so well and artfully, as to excite envy.' Others interpret the word invidiosi in the Latin sense of odious,-truths that Į were odious to somebody; which interpretation is supported by the fact that Sigier was summoned before the primate of the Dominicans on suspicion of heresy, but not convicted. 147. Milton, At a Solemn Musick: "Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven's joy; Sphere-born harmonious sisters, Voice and Verse; Wed your divine sounds, and mixed power employ Dead things with inbreathed sense able to pierce; And to our high-raised fantasy present Hymns devout and holy psalms That we on earth, with undiscording voice, din Broke the fair music that all creatures made To their great Lord, whose love their motion swayed In perfect diapason, whilst they stood To his celestial concert us unite, To live with him, and sing in endless morn of light!" CANTO XI. 1. The Heaven of the Sun continued. The praise of St. Francis by Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican. 4. Lucretius, Nature of Things, Book II. 1, Good's Tr. :— "How sweet to stand, when tempests tear the main, On the firm cliff, and mark the seaman's toil! To mark the strife for honours and renown, "The holy flock Which Dominic conducteth by a road Where well one fattens if he strayeth not." 26. Canto X. 112: "Where knowledge So deep was put, that, if the true be true, To see so much there never rose a second." 32. The Church. Luke xxiii. 46: "And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit; and having said thus, he gave up the ghost." 34. Romans viii. 38: "For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." 'La cui inirabil vita Meglio in gloria del ciel si canterebbe,' was inspired by love for all created things, in the most insignificant of which he recognized a common origin with himself. The little lambs hung up for slaughter excited his pity, and the captive birds his tender sympathy; the swallows he called his sisters, sororcula mea, when he begged them to cease their twitterings while he preached; the worm he carefully removed from his path, lest it should be trampled on by a less careful foot; and, in love with poverty, he lived upon the simplest food, went clad in the scantiest garb, and enjoined chastity and obedience upon his followers, who within four years numbered no less than fifty thousand; but St. Dominic, though originally of a kind and compassionate nature, sacrificed whole hecatombs of victims in his zeal for the Church, showing how far fanaticism can change the kindest heart, and make it look with complacency upon deeds which would have formerly excited its ab. horrence." 37. The Seraphs love most, the Cherubs know most. Thomas Aquinas, Sum. Theol., I. Quæst. CVIII. 5, says, in substance, that the Seraphim are so called from burning; according to the three properties of fire, namely, continual motion upward, excess of heat, and of light. And again, in the same article, that Cherubim, being interpre in them is fourfold; namely, perfect vision of God, full reception of divine light, contemplation of beauty in the order of things, and copious effusion of the divine cognition upon others. 35. St. Francis and St. Dominic. Mr. Perkins, Tuscan Sculptors, I. 7, says: "In warring against Frederic, whose courage, cunning, and ambition gave them ceaseless cause for alarm, and in strengthening and extending the influence of the Church, much shaken by the many heresics which had sprung up in Italy and France, the Popes re-ted, is plenitude of knowledge, which ceived invaluable assistance from the Minorites and the Preaching Friars, whose orders had been established by Pope Innocent III. in the early part of the century, in consequence of a vision, in which he saw the tottering walls of the Lateran basilica supported by an Italian and a Spaniard, in whom he afterwards recognized their respective founders, SS. Francis and Dominic. Nothing could be more opposite than the means which these two celebrated men employed in the work of conversion; for while St. Francis used persuasion and tenderness to melt the hardhearted, St. Dominic forced and crushed them into submission. St. Francis, 40. Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican, here celebrates the life and deeds of St. Francis, leaving the praise of his own Saint to Bonaventura, a Franciscan, to show that in heaven there are no rivalries nor jealousies between the two orders, as there were on earth. 43. The town of Ascesi, or Assisi, as it is now called, where St. Francis was born, is situated between the rivers Tupino and Chiasi, on the slope of Monte Subaso, where St. Ubald had |