and dialecticians,--carried with it the popular voice in the church and the universities. The time allotted by these to philological literature was curtailed, that the professors of logic and philosophy might detain their pupils longer. Grammar continued to be taught in the university of Paris; but rhetoric, another part of the trivium, was given up; by which it is to be understood, as I conceive, that no classical authors were read, or, if at all, for the sole purpose of verbal explanation.[166] The thirteenth century, says Heeren, was one of the most unfruitful for the study of ancient literature.[167] He does not seem to except Italy, though there, as we shall soon see, the remark is hardly just. But in Germany the tenth century, Leibnitz declares, was a golden age of learning, compared with the thirteenth;[168] and France itself is but a barren waste in this period. The relaxation of manners among the monastic orders, which, generally speaking, is the increasing theme of complaint from the eleventh century, and the swarms of worse vermin, the Mendicant Friars, who filled Europe with stupid superstition, are assigned by Meiners and Heeren as the leading causes of the return of ignorance.[169] [164] Meiners, ii. 605. Heeren, p. 228. Eichhorn, Allg. Gesch. der Litteratur, ii. 63-118. The running title of Eichhorn’s section, Die Wissenschaften verfallen in Barbarey, seems much too generally expressed. [165] Metalogicus, l. i. c. 24. This passage has been frequently quoted. He was very inimical to the dialecticians, as philologers generally are. [166] Crevier, ii. 376. [167] P. 237. [168] Introductio in Script. Brunwic., § lxiii., apud Heeren, et Meiners, ii. 631. No one has dwelt more fully than this last writer on the decline of literature in the thirteenth century, out of his cordial antipathy to the schoolmen. P. 589, et post. Wood, who has no prejudices against popery, ascribes the low state of learning in England under Edward III. and Richard II. to the misconduct of the mendicant friars, and to the papal provisions that impoverished the church. [169] Meiners, ii. 615. Heeren, 235. |Relapse into barbarism.|