2. Secular training. Knowledge in the “Seven Liberal Arts,” _i. e._ the _trivium_――grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic; and the more advanced _quadrivium_,――music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. These names are suggestive of a vast amount of knowledge, while, in truth, very little was known or taught in these subjects. Astronomy and arithmetic were employed to find the time of Easter. Geometry included some propositions of Euclid without demonstrations. Music included plain song and a mystic doctrine of number. More was made of grammar, the study of rhetoric from Latin classics, and dialectics. Dialectics was logic in the Middle Ages, and its mysteries fascinated the mediæval man. But even in logic there were only some remnants of the Aristotelian logic known. =A Mediæval Library.= Here again is an interesting question: What did this mediæval churchman read? But we must make a distinction between books most commonly read, books that the scholars might use, and books most influential upon thought. =1. Books most commonly read.= These would be the text-books used in instruction. They are as follows:―― The _Psalms_. The _Grammar_ of Donatus. The Christian poets: Prudentius, _Psychomachia_; Juvencus, _Gospels in Verse_; Sedulius, _Easter Hymn_. Dionysius Cato, _Disticha de Moribus_, a collection of proverbs (moral maxims) in rhyming couplets. Virgil, Ovid, and the rhetorical works of Cicero. Æsop’s _Fables_ (in Latin). =2. Books that the scholars might use.= It is difficult to say what any particular scholar actually did read, for the libraries of monasteries differed enormously in the character and number of their books; some monasteries had several hundred books, some none at all. Some libraries were composed almost entirely of works of the Fathers; some possessed a good many works of ancient classical writers. One _might_ expect to find any one or more of the following works in a scholar’s library:―― Aristotle, _De Interpretatione_ and the _Categories_ in Boëthius’ translation. This explains why the logical problems occupied the almost exclusive attention of the first schoolmen. Plato, the _Timæus_. This was known to the Irish monks perhaps in Greek, but on the continent in a translation by Chalcidius. The only other sources of knowledge of Plato were in the works of Augustine and the neo-Platonists. Commentaries on Aristotle,――The _Isagoge_ by Porphyry, in a translation into Latin by Boëthius, and some commentaries by Boëthius himself on Aristotle’s _De Interpretatione_ and _Categories_. Cicero, the rhetorical and dialectical treatises, such as the _Topica_, _De Officiis_. Seneca, _De Beneficiis_. Lucretius, _De Rerum Natura_. Augustine’s works and some pseudo-Augustinian writings. The works of the Church Fathers, Clement of Alexandria and Origen. The _Pseudo-Dionysius_, translated from the Greek by Erigena.