It serves to illustrate the meshes which held the highest men of the twelfth century together, when we encounter Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny. His true name was Pierre Maurice de Montboisier and he was from Auvergne—“one of the noblest and most genial natures,” says Morison, “to be met with in this or in any time.” What a fine old man he was! Under him as abbot, Bernard of Cluny was prior, and the loving care of Peter prepared an epitaph for that bravest and sweetest of singers. It was he who bearded the other Bernard in his very den, and who came out of many contests against that almost invincible ecclesiast with more honor than before. Few could say this of a battle with the Abbot of Clairvaux; and to no one but Peter does Morison, the biographer of Bernard, concede any such victory. It was also this admirable Peter who took Peter Abelard under his protection. With a large and patient generosity he developed the better nature of that headstrong, conceited, unhappy man; and when Abelard died he wrote to Heloise the really warmhearted and tender letter, with a great deal of humanity about it, which I have quoted already. And thus, to whomsoever it may fall to consider the history of France in the twelfth century; or of Abelard and the new philosophy; or of Bernard and ecclesiastical polity; or of the other Bernard and the Latin hymns, it is inevitable that the name of Peter the Venerable shall arise and stand high above the throng of those by which he is surrounded. His mother’s name was Raingarde, and her death, long after he had attained his wide reputation, was deeply felt by him as that of one of the best of women and dearest of mothers. For Pierre de Montboisier, in those days when the stagnation and corruption of thought and morals were not felt as they were felt later on, was a man as well as a monk. But when, at last, the religious people became monks and not men; when they were stupid, uninteresting, fat-fleshed and gross in life; when they had no courage or piety; then they neither did the world any good nor made their own souls ripe for heaven. And as sportsmen tell us that the mellow “bob-o-link” ceases to sing and is only fit for slaughter when he becomes the “rice bird” of the South, so it was with them. Latin hymnology almost ceases to be interesting after this century. And Peter the Venerable, while he wrote but little himself, is too fine a factor in the arousing of others for us to forget him and his work.