etc., who opened schools wherever any number of scholars forgathered. Thus the historical imagination can readily picture all that is contained in the brief phrase with which Abélard dismisses the five or six years of his studies. ‘There was no regular curriculum in those days,’ Mr. Rashdall says, in his study of the ‘Universities of Europe’; but the seven liberal arts were taught, and were gradually arranging themselves in a series under the pressure of circumstances. Music Abélard certainly studied; before many years his songs were sung through the length and breadth of France. None of his contemporaries made a more eager and profitable study of what was called grammar—that is, not merely an exercise in the rules of Donatus and Priscian, but a close acquaintance with the great Latin poets and historians. Rhetoric and dialectics he revelled in—‘I went wherever dialectics flourished.’ To so good purpose did he advance in this work of loosening the tongue and sharpening the wit, that throughout his life the proudest orators and thinkers of Christendom shrank in dismay from the thought of a verbal encounter with him. ‘I am a child beside him,’ pleaded Bernard of Clairvaux, at a time when France, and even Rome, trembled at the sound of his own voice. But we must defer for a few pages the consideration of mediæval dialectics. ‘Illi soli patuit quicquid scibile erat,’ said an ancient epitaph; and, though the historian handles epigrams with discretion, it must be admitted that Abélard surpassed his contemporaries, not only in ability and in utterance, but also in erudition. There is the one exception of mathematics, but it seems probable that he despised what passed under that name in the twelfth century. ‘Mathematics,’ he says somewhere, in a sarcastic parenthesis, ‘the exercise of which is nefarious.’ But in the thrust and parry of dialectics he found a keen delight; and so he wandered from place to place, edging his logical weapons on fellow-pupils and provincial masters, until one day, about the opening year of the twelfth century, he directed his steps towards far-famed Paris—beautiful, naughty, brilliant, seductive Paris, even in those distant days. But the Paris of the first decade of the twelfth century was wholly different, not only from the Paris of to-day, but even from the Paris of Victor Hugo’s famous picture. CHAPTER II A BRILLIANT VICTORY