sweeping, or drawing water, or amusing with a tune on the reed-flute: or to wear the cast-off tunics of their masters. It is fitting that we should first find little Pierre—Master Roscelin recalls him in later years as ‘the smallest of my pupils’—under the care of a rationalist scholar. Love was the first rock on which the fair promise of his early manhood was shattered, but throughout the long, sternly religious years that followed, it was his restless application of reason to the veiled dogmas of faith that brought endless cruelty and humiliation upon him. Now, Jean Roscelin, canon of Compiègne, was the rationalist of his day. As Abélard was fated to do, he had attempted to unveil the super-sacred doctrine of the Trinity; not in the spirit of irreverent conceit, with which people credited both him and Abélard, but for the help of those who were afflicted with a keen intellect and an honest heart. For this he had been banished from England in 1093, and from the kingdom of France, and had settled in one or other of the Gaulish provinces. Mme. Guizot, in her very careful study of Abélard, sees no evidence for the statement that he studied under Roscelin, but the fact is now beyond dispute. Otto von Freising, a contemporary historian, says that he ‘had Roscelin for his first master’; Aventinus and others also speak of Roscelin as an early teacher of his. Roscelin himself, in a letter which it seems ‘frivolous,’ as Deutsch says, to hesitate to accept, claims that Abélard sat at his feet—it was the literal practice in those days—‘from boyhood to youth.’ Abélard, on the other hand, writes that he attended Roscelin’s lectures ‘for a short time’; but this correspondence took place at a moment when the one would be greatly disposed to exaggerate and the other to attenuate. An anonymous anecdote, which we shall examine presently, pretends that he found Roscelin unsatisfactory, but ‘controlled his feeling so far as to remain under Roscelin for a year.’ It is clear enough that he spent a few of his earlier years on the hay-strewn floor of Master Roscelin’s lecture-hall.