miserable because less determined, took refuge in the taverns, and drank away the little remains of vitality left in them, or as often were despatched in the unseemly brawls which tavern‐life was sure to foster. Then, as the brighter side of the picture, there were the monasteries, especially that of the Dominicans of S. James, where eager scholars studied in peace and order; the cloisters of Notre Dame, where venerable orthodoxy was long entrenched; the Sorbonne, destined to be for ages the most celebrated school of theology in Europe, and to hold its own long after the mediæval university had decayed. Disputed cases were sent to the Sorbonne for decision, popes took the advice of its doctors on important ecclesiastical matters, and its students possessed even greater personal immunities than their fellows of other colleges. Then, if we are to take the personal representatives of this wonderful university into account, what a forest of illustrious names starts up before our bewildered vision! In the XIth century, quite at the latter end, we are introduced to the gifted Abelard, who during the first half of the XIIth century gathered together all the stormy elements of the age, and centred upon himself the attention of the intellectual world. “He appears to have possessed,” says Prior Vaughan, “the special gift of rendering articulate the cravings of the age in which he lived.... One day he took into his hands Ezechiel the Prophet, and boasted that next morning he would deliver a lecture on the Prophecy. With bitter irony some of his companions implored him to take a _little_ longer time to prepare; he replied with disdain, ‘My road is not the road of custom, but the road of genius.’ He was true to his word, and mockery was speedily turned to amazement when his companions, overcome with his eloquence, followed him verse after verse as he unfolded the hidden sense of the obscurest of prophecies, with a facility of diction and clearness of exposition and a readiness of resource which subdued the mind and captivated the imagination.” Success was his idol, pride his natural temper. He thought no question above his understanding, no truth beyond his apprehension; he threw down the glove in the face of a system more for the sake of routing its exponent than of impugning its truth, and when all eyes were upon him, and the populace of Paris rushed madly out on its door‐steps and house‐tops to cheer him as he passed, his end was won and his dearest wish fulfilled. One by one all his opponents were silenced; from school to school he rose, till at last the chair of Notre Dame was his; his name eclipsed that of all the masters of Paris, and drove from men’s minds even the fame of the doctors of the church.... And then what was the climax? It is told in three words—Héloïse, Soissons, and Sens. True, there was a long interval between the two misfortunes represented by the first two names, and that galling one which at last