The grey friar of the fourteenth century, as we know him in Langland and Chaucer, or later in the degraded fanaticism of the Observants, had fallen far from the example of his master. Perhaps the chief reason for Bacon’s decision was that his friend Grosseteste, who on the first coming of the friars wrote eloquently to Gregory the Ninth of their illumination, humility and piety, was a member of the Order, and was the first of its Rectors in Oxford. (Rd. Grosseteste, Epist. ed. Luard; Rolls, 1861, p. 179.) Even in Cambridge, till 1877, teachers and professors, save those of Law or Medicine, were generally speaking in holy orders; for instance, the following extract, of date 1849, which I owe to the kindness of Dr Donald MacAlister, “Cæterum neminem in socium unquam admitti volumus qui non sit aut Theologiam professurus et sacros ordines post certum temporis intervallum inferius definiendum suscepturus aut e Collegio discessurus, nisi unus e duobus sociis qui Medicinæ aut ex illis duobus qui Juris Civilis studio deputati sunt, electus fuerit.” (Stat. Coll. Div. Joh. Evan. Cant. cap. xii. 28 April, 12 Vict. 1849.) To this hour in England the clergy command the public schools. In a warlike society learning and contemplation must fall to the clergy; without the fortresses of war or learning, if there was any safety, there was not dignity or peace. The mendicant orders were young institutions, ascendant, and in favour with the great. Of their usurpations in the universities I have spoken. Within them even Popes could not meddle, as Bacon found to his sorrow. Hales and Ockham also became Minors, as Albert and St Thomas, both of illustrious descent, became Preachers. Moreover the Franciscans had devoted themselves to the care of the sick, and especially of those smitten with the new pestilences—such as leprosy, syphilis, and plague—which Oriental dirt and asceticism had engendered or inflamed; and thus a bent to observation of natural phenomena may have been encouraged (see art. Roger Bacon, Westminster Rev. loc. cit.). To say that to the monks we owe the conservation of learning is not so true as to say that learned men betook themselves to the religious houses in order to find relief from turmoil, to secure the subsistence of life without its cares, to get access to books, and to profit by the counsel of comrades who had enjoyed not only the culture of their own house, but also the interchange of ideas and manuscripts with all the learned houses in Europe. When these advantages were to be had in the world, learning deserted the monasteries. Again, Bacon was not an unbeliever, nor anything like it; in the _Opus Majus_ he declares the Holy Scriptures to be the source of all truth; not only, like Socrates before him and Kant after him, did he fix his eyes on moral perfection as the end, but also on the Church as the means: on the other hand the resentments