The University then, or, more strictly speaking, the _Studium Generale_, existed as an institution long before the organisation of the residential college or hall; and as a consequence, for many a year it had an organisation quite independent of its colleges. The University of Cambridge, like the University of Oxford, was modelled mainly on the University of Paris. Its course of study followed the old classical tradition of the division of the seven liberal sciences--grammar, logic, rhetoric, music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy--into two classes, the _Trivium_ and _Quadrivium_, a system of teaching which had been handed down by the monastic schools in a series of text-books, jejune and meagre, which were mainly compilations and abridgments from the older classical sources. One such treatise, perhaps the most popular in the monastery schools, was a book by Martianus Capella, a teacher of rhetoric at Carthage, in the fifth century. The treatise is cast in allegorical form, and represents the espousals of Mercury and Philology, in which Philology is represented as a goddess, and the seven liberal arts as handmaidens presented by Mercury to his bride. The humour of this allegory is not altogether spiritless, if at times somewhat coarse. Here is a specimen. The plaudits that follow upon the discourse delivered by Arithmetica are supposed to be interrupted by laughter, occasioned by the loud snores of Silenus asleep under the influence of his deep potations. The kiss wherewith Rhetorica salutes Philologia is heard throughout the assembly--_nihil enim silens, ac si cuperet, faciebat_. So popular did this mythological medley become, that in the tenth century we find certain learned monks embroidering the subject of the poem on their Church vestments. A _memoria technica_ in hexameter lines has also come down to us, showing how the monastic scholar was assisted to remember that grammar, dialectics, and rhetoric belonged to the first division of the sciences called the _Trivium_, and that the four other sciences belonged to the _Quadrivium_:-- "_Gram._: loquitur; _Dia._: vera docet; _Rhet._: verba colorat, _Mus._: canit; _Ar._: numerat; _Geo._: ponderat; _Ast._: colit astra." In a further classification given by another scholar of the end of the twelfth century, Alexander Neckham, we have enumerated the four Faculties recognised by the mediæval University: Arts, Theology, Law, Medicine. "Hic florent Artes, Coelestis Pagina regnat, Stant Leges, lucet Jus: Medicina viget."