introduction to the study of the Angelic Doctor, and at the same time give the enquiring mind some notion of how S. Thomas has performed one of the greatest feats that genius ever accomplished—the successful and consistent “conversion” of the greatest, the most original, and the most precise of heathen philosophers into a hewer of wood and carrier of water for the faith. We would gladly dwell on the three chapters at the end of Vol. I., in which the writer, in reviewing the writings of the Saint in defence and exaltation of monasticism, gives a useful and spirited history of the whole of that exciting contest which took its beginning in William of S. Amour’s book called _Perils of the Last Times_. It seems really impossible to say how much the religious state, humanly speaking, owes to the man who wrote the book _Against Those who attack the Service of God and Religion_, and that _On the Perfection of the Spiritual Life_. Passing now from the more remote surroundings of the hero of the story to the immediate scene of the greatest portion of his labors, we venture to believe that one of the most popular parts of this work of Prior Vaughan’s will be his animated description of the university system of the thirteenth century, and of the University of Paris in particular. He has spared no pains in getting at correct details and putting them artistically together. M. Franklin’s splendid and comparatively unknown labors on mediæval Paris have supplied him with matter that will be found nowhere else. Paris is the natural type of the great mediæval university. More central and accessible than Oxford, safer than Bologna, freer than Naples, and founded on a wide and grand basis, the University of Paris soon grew into a formidable assemblage of men who, whilst ostensibly votaries of science, were not unprovided with excitable spirits and rough hands. Students gathered, rich and poor, great doctors taught, munificent founders, like Robert of Sorbon, bestowed their money or their influence, the monks of all orders gathered round silently, and to some extent distrustfully, from Citeaux, from Cluny, even from the Grande Chartreuse, with the Benedictines of S. Germain, the Premonstratensians—their church was where now stands the _Café de la Rotonde_—and the Augustinians. As for the Dominicans and Franciscans, they, as may be supposed, were early on the spot, to teach quite as much as to learn. The following is a sketch of the men who flocked to the great university—at least of one considerable class: