The voyagers arrive at Salerno; and we are immediately introduced to the schools, sonorous with academical wrangling. Mr Longfellow displays much humour in this part of his poem, having, we think, hit off excellently the extreme acerbity exhibited by the scholastic disputants on the most worthless of imaginable subjects. He has given us a vivid picture of the war which was so long maintained between the sect of the Nominalists and that of the Realists; and not less of the fury which possessed the souls of ancient hostile grammarians. "The heat and acrimony of verbal critics," says Disraeli the elder, "have exceeded description. Their stigmas and anathemas have been long known to bear no proportion against the offences to which they have been directed. 'God confound you,' cried one grammarian to another, 'for your theory of impersonal verbs!'" In the _Golden Legend_ we have first a travelling Scholastic affixing, as was the usual custom, his Theses to the gate of the college, and offering to maintain his one hundred and twenty-five propositions against all the world. Then appear two Doctors disputing, followed by their pupils. DOCTOR SERAFINO. "I, with the Doctor Seraphic, maintain That a word which is only conceived in the brain Is a type of eternal Generation; The spoken word is the Incarnation. DOCTOR CHERUBINO. What do I care for the Doctor Seraphic, With all his wordy chaffer and traffic? DOCTOR SERAFINO. You make but a paltry show of resistance; Universals have no real existence! DOCTOR CHERUBINO. Your words are but idle and empty chatter; Ideas are eternally joined to matter! DOCTOR SERAFINO. May the Lord have mercy on your position, You wretched, wrangling, culler of herbs! DOCTOR CHERUBINO. May he send your soul to eternal perdition, For your Treatise on the Irregular Verbs!" (_They rush out fighting._) The sort of intellectual diet supplied to the students of Salerno is next explained by a hopeful votary of Sangrado. It seems very tempting. SECOND SCHOLAR. "What are the books now most in vogue? FIRST SCHOLAR.