We are rather prone to think in our time that the conditions in which men were born and reared before what we are pleased to call modern times, and, above all, in the Middle Ages, must have made a distinct handicap for their intellectual development. Most of us are quite sure that the conditions in medieval cities were eminently unsuited for the stimulation of the intellect, for incentive to art impulse, for uplift in the intellectual life, or for any such broad interest in what has been so well called the humanities--the humanizing things that lift us above animal necessities--as would make for genuinely liberal education. We are likely to be set in the opinion that the environment of the growing youth of an old-time city, especially so early as the middle of the twelfth century, was poor and sordid. The cares of the citizens are presumed to have been mainly for material concerns, and, indeed, mostly for the wants of the body. They were only making a start on the way from barbarism to something like our glorious culmination of civilization. As "the heirs to all the ages in the foremost files of time" we are necessarily far in advance of them, and we are only sorry that they did not have the opportunity to live to see our day and enjoy the benefits of the evolution of humanity that is taking place during the eight centuries that have elapsed. As a matter of fact, there was much more of abiding profound interest in real civilization in many a medieval city, much more general appreciation of art, much more breadth of intelligence and sympathy with what we call the humanities, than in most of our large cities. The large city, as we know it, is eminently a discourager of breadth of intelligence. Specialism in the various phases of money-making obscures culture. Maimonides, born in Cordova, was brought up amid surroundings that teemed with incentives of every kind to the development of intelligence, of artistic taste, and everything that makes for cultivation of intellect rather than of interest in merely material things.