We are now at, or near, the year 1118. In the thirty-ninth year of his age, the twenty-third year of his scholastic activity, Abélard has reached the highest academic position in Christendom. He who loved so well, and so naturally, to be admired, found himself the centre of a life that had not been seen since Greek sages poured out wisdom in the painted colonnade, and the marble baths, and the shady groves of Athens. His self-esteem was flattered; his love of rule and of eminence was gratified. Poor as many of his pupils were, their number brought him great wealth. His refinement had ample means of solacing its desires. The petty vexations of the struggle were nobly compensated. Before him lay a world of fairest promise into which he, seemingly, had but to enter. Then there arose one of the forces that shattered his life, beginning its embodiment in an idyll, ending quickly in a lurid tragedy. It is the most difficult stage in the story of Abélard. I approach it only in the spirit of the artist, purposing neither to excuse nor to accuse, but only to trace, if I may, the development of a soul. Abélard’s life had until now been purely spiritual, almost wholly intellectual. His defects were spiritual—conceit and ambition; if, as men assure us, it is a defect to recognise that you have a supra-normal talent, and to strive for the pre-eminence it entitles you to. The idealist spirit in which he had turned away from the comfort and quiet of the château had remained thus far the one fire that consumed his energy. In the pretty theory of Plato, his highest soul had silenced the lower, and reduced the lowest to the barest requisite play of vegetative life. There are men who go through life thus. The scientist would crudely—it is the fashion to say ‘crudely’—explain that the supra-normal activity of the upper part of the nervous system made the action of the lower part infra-normal; but let us keep on the spiritual plane. There are men whose soul is so absorbed in study or in contemplation that love never reaches their consciousness; or if it does, its appeal is faint, and quickly rejected. The condition of such a life, highly prized as it is by many, is constant intellectual strain.