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Glastonbury monks, on their asserting that they had the body of St. Dunstan. The central persons of Eadmer's chronicle of his own time, which is as true a record as the clever and honest monk could make it, are the Archbishops of Canterbury, Lanfranc, Anselm, and Ralph; Anselm, however, is the great king of the history, beginning to reign before the end of the first book, and dying only at the beginning of the fifth. Eadmer was to the backbone a monk, strict in all claims of ecclesiastical power; but, like Anselm, he was a monk with a breath of original genius. It delighted him to hear Anselm, who was seldom silent, talk and philosophise with a didactic fancy. Besides writing the Life of Anselm, Eadmer gathered a book of the Similitudes of St. Anselm, a book of theological ethics and metaphysics, in nearly two hundred little chapters of philosophy, with tedious, unsubstantial divisions, enlivened throughout by a thoughtful play of the imagination. Other books of Eadmer's are on the Excellence of the Virgin Mary, who excels all creatures; on the Four Virtues that were in the Virgin Mary, and her Sublimity; and on the Heavenly Beatitude.*

Again, let us look southwards to the Arabs, that we may connect the future with the past. While Alcuin was labouring for Charlemagne, the great Caliph Haroun al Raschid, who reigned between the years 786-809, was master of the Moslem world, and stood for a time at the head of the whole

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Early Arabian influ

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*Eadmer's "Historia Novorum was edited in 1623 by Selden, with Notes that are added to the history in the edition of Eadmer's works included in Migne's Patrologia, where they form a part of vol. 159. Several unpublished MSS. of works by Eadmer are in the library of Bennett College, Cambridge, which contains the MS. of his "Historia Novorum." Among these unpublished works are his Letters. In the Archbishop's library at Canterbury is a MS. of Eadmer on Ecclesiastical Liberty, specially setting forth the quarrel between Anselm and William Rufus.

world's best material civilisation. The germ of a more substantial and enduring progress was possessed by Christian nations, but the brilliant powers of the Arabs were then being stimulated to their utmost exercise. The son of Haroun al Raschid, Al Mamoun, the seventh caliph of the race of the Abassides (813-833), became caliph in the same year that Charlemagne's son, Louis the Pious, succeeded to his father's empire; he belongs, therefore, to the period between the days of Alcuin and those of Erigena. Al Mamoun died sixteen years before King Alfred's birth, and was in his own way the great Alfred of the Arabs, who promoted to the utmost of his large opportunities the spread of literature and art among his people. He gathered the learned to his court. He took tribute of subject provinces, not in gold and material produce, but in their products of mind, in manuscripts and books. Hundreds of camels might in his day be seen entering Bagdad loaded with books and papers; and whatever was considered valuable in the thoughts of many minds expressed in many tongues that were thus poured into the capital, Al Mamoun caused to be translated into Arabic. The modest band of copyists that Alcuin sent to York to transcribe books for the enrichment of the empire of Charlemagne was not to be compared to the host of Saracen translators and scribes. Bassora and Cufa were almost as rich in treatises and poems as Bagdad. Libraries of a fabulous extent were accumulated. In Spain, during the Arab occupation, seventy great libraries were open for instruction of the public; and there were schools, of the kind to which some trace the origin of our university system, at Cordova, Granada, Seville. From the ninth to the fourteenth century arts and letters followed the conquests of a people which had begun its career as a few tribes of simple and hardy horsemen and lancebearers, to one of whom a handful of dates was a sufficient dinner.

The highest forms of human power seem to be obtained only by mixture of race; and I do not doubt that it was in the design of Providence to give the strength to those who had most widely accepted neighbours from the world beyond the narrow bounds of their own tribe. But of single races Baron Larrey was, perhaps, with some exaggeration, not altogether wrong in considering the Arabs to possess the highest physical perfection. He believed that he found the convolutions of their brain to be deeper and more numerous, the matter itself of the brain and of the nerves to be denser, than in Europeans; the heart and arterial system remarkably regular and perfect in development; the external senses exquisitely acute; "their sight is most extensive in its range; they hear at very great distances; and can, through a very extensive region, perceive the most subtle odour." They are said by other eulogists to have produced more poets than all the other peoples of the world taken together. But their poetry seems to have been unsubstantial in its brilliancy, consisting in a heat and strain of fancy that made Pindar and Euripides pass for cold writers in their estimation, Homer and Sophocles for colder yet, and Virgil for a man to set the teeth chattering. When they collected treasures of wit from the nations, they did not, even as a matter of curiosity, care to translate the Western poets. Al Mamoun took tribute in Greek books from the Emperor Michael the Stammerer, but, his own taste being also for science and mathematics, he set his translators to work not on the Greek poets, but on their philosophers. Arabic poetry consisted chiefly in lyrics about or between innumerable lovers and innumerable princesses. There were elegies and moral verses, but there was no comedy or tragedy, no epic sustaining vigorously some high argument of God or man. An insatiable curiosity for knowledge and a lively humour produced, in the form of didactic poems, treatises

on Grammar, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, or Natural History; and to the production of poetry of this sort all the wit on the coasts of the Mediterranean was stimulated. Arab philosophy fastened also upon Aristotle rather than upon Plato. The poetical spirit of Plato, essentially Christian, was at once too simple and too deep for a fancy that played with most pleasure over artificial subtleties. The definitions and distinctions of Aristotle gave an employment it enjoyed to the Arabic mind. Avicenna, the great Arabian philosopher, says that he began study by reading the Metaphysics of Aristotle forty times without understanding them. Avicenna lived as a most famous philosopher and physician while Canute was king in England, and the Arabian Averroes was commenting on Aristotle at the end of the twelfth century. To the Arabian influence was partly owing the peculiar reverence for Aristotle in the universities of Europe before the Reformation, which was ushered in among the learned by outpost skirmishes between Aristotelians and Platonists. But the great period of Saracen art, literature, and science, showed the Arabs to be indefatigable students; ready as Aristotle was—although his idolaters in Europe were not-to go to Nature herself for a true science. One of these Arabian scholars travelled forty years to study mineralogy; another went over all Europe collecting plants. And with all this there was their own nature freely expressed in the continual invention and enjoyment of those bright, fanciful tales of whose great number a very small part has become familiar to us in Scheherezade's Thousand and One Tales of the Arabian Nights' Entertainment.

The people of the south of Europe caught the humour of the singing and the story-telling, and none sooner than those of Provence, among whom a language and literature rapidly formed afterwards fell almost as rapidly into decline. Provence

Songs of the
Troubadours
Origin of the
Romance
Languages.

inherits the name of the province that Rome had obtained on the southern coast of Gaul not long before the second Punic war. It retained the name when Cæsar had subdued the rest of Gaul, but varied at different times in its extent. Under Augustus the Provincia Romana, or Gallia Narbonensis, which had for its chief city Narbonne, joined Dauphiné, Savoy, Roussillon with Foix, and at last all Languedoc, except Velay and Gevaudan, to Provence; the western half of the south of France being called Aquitaine. Subsequent political changes produced restrictions of the name to narrower bounds. The language preserved in the poetry of the Provençal troubadours was the first acknowledged successor of the Roman speech, called,. therefore, Romance; and it was the theory of M. Raynouard that the Romance language, formed from the corruption of Latin, was common to all the countries of Europe in which Latin had been spoken; was a regular fixed language, the Rustic Roman; with constant rules, universally understood over Roman Europe, and the common source from which the modern Latin or Romance languages were derived. The ancient Provençal-called also, from the word in it signifying yes, the Langue d'Oc-would thus be a widely-spread language, Rustic Roman, only son and heir of the old Roman Latin, named afterwards from one only of the districts in which it was spoken. It would have the same relation of parent to modern Provençal that it has to modern French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, which are all children of the Rustic Latin and the grandchildren of Latin.* But this opinion has not prevailed;

* M. Raynouard was the first thorough student of the old Provençal literature. Having begun his researches in the year 1807, in 1816 he published the first of six volumes of his "Choix des Poésies Originales des Troubadours" (Paris, 1816-1821), which contained a preliminary discussion upon the ancient Romance language and its grammar before the year 1000, besides a grammar of the language of the Troubadours,

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