Whether the Bishop of Poitiers had much or little learning, he wrote a valuable book on _Synods_, and translated for us many useful and otherwise inaccessible confessions of faith and statements of doctrine. Erasmus—himself no brave man, nor one likely to estimate moral courage properly—calls this letter to Abra “_nugamentum hominis otiose indocti_”—the trifling production of a man lazily uneducated! Well, perhaps it would have been as well if some of that same “luxurious ignorance” of Hilary could have secured the “laborious learning” of Erasmus from exhibiting, at the end of life, its own inefficiency. Jerome said that whoever found fault with Hilary’s knowledge was compelled to concede his philosophic skill; and it reminds one of the remark of Dante Rossetti, who said that nothing in our age could stand comparison with a sonnet of Shakespeare, for, rough as it might seem, _Shakespeare wrote it_. It was this manhood behind the Latin which went for more than all Rotterdam! Hilary is credited with a great deal, doubtless, that he never wrote. So he is, by Fortunatus, with miracles which he never performed. Alcuin and others assign to him the _Gloria in Excelsis_, but this was certainly more ancient than Hilary, being quoted by Athanasius in his treatise on Virginity. He could at best merely have translated it. This he might also have done for the _Te Deum laudamus_. And since we know that he prepared a _Liber Hymnorum_—the first actual hymn-book of the Western Church—we have some reason to think that he would not have altogether forgotten the greatest chants of the early Christians. This hymn-book is utterly lost to us. This is not the same as the _Liber Mysteriorum_—the book of the mysteries—and its existence, like that of its companion work, rests upon the testimony of Jerome. Doubtless in it there were other poems and songs from which the Hilarian authorship has been broken or lost. It was not the ancient custom either to preserve the author’s name, or even to retain the precise form of his hymn. He threw his little lyric—as the Israelites did their jewelry—into the common treasury of the Church; and in the Breviaries, where so many of these hymns are to be discovered, a later and more critical scholarship may identify some of them hereafter. As delicate insects are preserved in amber, we there find much that we should otherwise have lost; but, like that very amber, when its electricity is excited, his was that sort of reputation which attracted many anonymous trifles—as, for example, the _Ad coeli clara_—to itself. Of Hilary’s other writings, with exception of his work on the Councils of Ariminum and Seleucia, we have the full text. His commentaries on the Psalms and on Matthew; his controversial pamphlets against Constantius; his book of _Synods_; his twelve books _De Trinitate_—these are accessible in the _Patrologia_ of Migne.