What a warm-blooded, good, hearty fellow Peter must have been! He had only found three hundred monks at Cluny in 1122; but Hugo of Cluny, his successor, was entitled to take rule, there and elsewhere, over ten thousand. Mount Tabor, the Valley of Jehoshaphat, and Constantinople were among the places where the “black” monks were well established. And a large share of this was due to the sagacity and statesmanship of Peter. In proof of this fine humanity, take his behavior to Abelard. The full story comes properly in another place; for Abelard himself was a writer of hymns, and worthy of more than transient reference. But when poor Abelard was repudiated, disgraced, shamefully mutilated, and nearly at despair’s edge, wearied out with St. Gildas and his refractory monks, and finally defeated by the purer and higher logic of Bernard, then, indeed, do we see Peter of Cluny at his best. He received the disappointed and broken man with “the welcome of an unutterably guileless and sympathetic heart.” Cluny’s gates opened wide to take him in. Cluny’s genial, restful spirit closed in about his own like the feathers of the mother bird around her callow, shivering brood. And when he dies, it is Cluny’s abbot who details with the loving particularity, which would most help the sore heart of Heloise, all his last doings. He speaks even to the kinship of every age when, after this long and tender letter, whose Latin glows with a deep fervency, he closes in this wise: “May God, in your stead, comfort him in his bosom; comfort him as another you; and guard him till through grace he is restored to you at the coming of the Lord, with the shout of the archangel and the trump of God descending from the heavens.” It is time that we speak of his writings, of which a full edition was published at Paris in 1522, one of the Cluniac monks being its compiler. Frequently, during the next two hundred years, they are republished in whole or in part. They are thus by no means inaccessible, though their merit is not so great. One of the important works is directed against the Jews, for whom he had a most pious dislike. Others are in the nature of epistles or of controversial replies, valuable only for their time and their spirit. Of his verse, however, we have left us but about fourteen specimens. One of these is against the detractors of the poetry of Peter of Poitiers, who were nearer right than he supposed them to be. Another is a rhymed epistle to a certain Raimond, of some sixty-four lines. Then we have a “prose,” the word being cognate to _prosody_, in honor of Jesus Christ. Its structure, except for the additional short syllable, is identical with the “leonine and tailed rhyme” of Bernard of Morlaix, his prior: “A patre mittitur, in terris nascitur, Deus de virgine Humana patitur, docet et moritur, libens pro homine.”