His Latin is much better than that of the great majority of his contemporaries. Judged by a perfect classical standard it is defective; it admits some of the erroneous forms that are characteristic of the age. But it is not without elegance, and it excels in clearness and elasticity. It could not well be otherwise, seeing his wide and familiar acquaintance with Latin literature. He frequently quotes Lucan, Ovid, Horace, Vergil, and Cicero; students of his writings usually add an acquaintance with Juvenal, Persius, Statius, Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, Quintilian, and Priscian. It was a frequent charge in the mouths of his enemies that he quoted the lewdest books of Ovid in the course of his interpretation of Scripture. The constant glance aside at the literature of human passion and the happy flash of wit were not small elements in his success. Those who came to him from other schools had heard little but the wearisome iteration of Boetius, Cassiodorus, and Martianus Capella. They found the new atmosphere refreshing and stimulating. His command of Greek and Hebrew is a subject of endless dispute. His pupil Heloise certainly had a knowledge of the two tongues, as we shall see presently. She must have received her instruction from Abélard. But it is clear that Abélard likes to approach a controversy which turns on the interpretation of the original text of Scripture through a third person, such as St. Jerome. He rarely approaches even the easy Greek text of the New Testament directly, and he has no immediate acquaintance with any Greek author. Aristotle he has read in the Latin translation of Boetius, through whose mediation he has also read Porphyry’s _Isagoge_. He was certainly familiar with the _De Interpretatione_ and the _Categories_; Cousin grants him also an acquaintance with the _Prior Analytics_; and Brucker and others would add the _Sophistici Elenchi_ and the _Topics_. The physical and metaphysical works of Aristotle were proscribed at Paris long after the Jewish and Arabian translations had found a way into other schools of France. The golden thoughts of Plato came to him through the writings of the fathers; though there is said to have been a translation of the _Timæus_ in France early in the twelfth century.