The mendicant friars under St. Francis and St. Dominic early forced their way into the chairs of the chief universities of Europe. Alexander Hales went first into Paris, then Oxford, giving a great impulse to the higher studies. The Dominicans produced Thomas Aquinas, the prince of schoolmen, who was born in 1228. The Franciscans also claimed Alexander Hales, Bonaventura, and Duns Scotus. These rival schoolmen divided the allegiance of the leading intellects of their time. FRIARS BURNING SENSELESS ORNAMENTS (A.D. 1429). It is related that in 1429, when Brother Richard, a Franciscan, returned from Jerusalem, he delivered so stirring a sermon that the people of Paris kindled hundreds of fires, in which men burned card and billiard tables, and the women their extravagant and gaudy ornaments. So at the preaching of Friar Jerome at Florence, the friars during the carnival incited a numerous flock of children to go round in all districts and in a spirit of humility and devotion beg people to deliver up all the profane books and pictures that were kept by them. These were freely given; and the devout women yielded humbly to these innocent preachers, suffered themselves to be despoiled of their dearest personal ornaments, and of everything that was used to give them a fictitious beauty. On the last day of the carnival, after having heard Mass, clothed in white, carrying on their heads garlands of olive, and red crosses in their hands, the children made a procession, singing psalms to the Piazzo dei Signori, where a pyramidal scaffold had been erected, upon which these instruments of pleasure and profane luxury were deposited. The children mounted the rostrum, and after having sung spiritual hymns the four deputies came down with lighted torches and set fire to the pile, and watched it as it was consumed amidst voices of joy and the sound of trumpets. Another saint of the Franciscan order, named Bernardine of Sienna, born in 1380, undertook a reform which was styled of the strict observance, and was the means of founding five hundred convents in Italy. He was a most famous preacher, and shone in his denunciations of the then prevailing weaknesses, which were the vices of gaming and divination and magic. His power over his contemporaries was supreme as a reconciler of long-standing enmities. He distinguished himself by collecting on the Capitoline Hill an immense assemblage of pictures, musical instruments, implements of gaming, false hair, and extravagant female dresses, of which he made an enormous bonfire. This saint was said to work miracles, but at last was charged with heresy and idolatry, on account of his using an ornament which he invented as a help to devotion. The Pope pronounced against this ornament, and the saint dutifully gave it up. He died in 1444, and at the jubilee in 1450 was canonised at the instance of Pope Nicolas V. AN ELOQUENT FRIAR ON THE FASHIONABLE VICES.