In 1138, Frederic Barbarossa consulted the Bolognese doctors as to the framing of a code of laws for his Germano‐Italian Empire, and in return for their help gave them the _Habita_, or series of protective ordinances which raised the Italian university almost to the level of that of Paris. Alexander III., formerly a theologian in its schools, also favored Bologna, and a tide of scholars from all parts of Europe began to flow towards the Apennines. Among these we find S. Thomas of Canterbury, who, as we know, made such brave use of the legal science he acquired there. Bologna was the second centre of the Dominican Order, the teaching order of the church—the instrument raised up in the warm‐hearted but intemperate middle ages to guide aright those lava‐streams of misdirected enthusiasm which at one time threatened to rationalize or fanaticize the intellectual world. It is at Bologna that we read of the miracles of the gentle and bright S. Dominic, and of the angels that constantly followed him to do the bidding of him who through opposition and misunderstanding was always doing God’s bidding. Here, too, S. Thomas of Aquin came once, and, being unknown to the procurator of the convent, was required to carry the basket while his companion collected the friars’ daily pittance through the streets. A true monk, he gladly obeyed, and was pained and confused when some of the passers‐by told the procurator of the mistake he had made. Italy was fruitful in universities, for, to mention only prominent names, there were Padua, Pavia, Salerno, and Naples, besides Rome, where the tradition of learning, especially sacred learning, was never quite broken. Padua was an offshoot from Bologna, and became famous in the XIIIth century for its devotion to classic literature and the liberal arts. At the time of the “Renaissance” it had become, however, a notorious focus of atheism.(93) Salerno was a school of medicine, and Pavia a brilliant and wicked resort of every intellectual aberration. We remember reading an excellent description of its vices, its dangers, and its attractions, in the life of a Venetian, a poet and child of genius, the friend and librettist of Mozart, whose name we cannot, however, recall. Even in those days of moral decadence the picture seemed appalling, and at Pavia as at Paris, as at Oxford in old times and our own day, there appears to have been no lack of brainless young profligates whose college career was a disgrace to their early education, and must have been a remorse prepared for their more sober conscience in later life.