The antique feeling of these lines is hardly balanced by the expressed sentiment: “plus Caesare Petrus!”[218] And again we hear the echo of the antique in “Nil artes, nil pura fides, nil gloria linguae, Nil fons ingenii, nil probitas sine re.”[219] Hildebert has also a poem “On his Exile,” perhaps written while in England with the Red King. Quite in antique style it sings the loss of friends and fields, gardens and granaries, which the writer possessed while _prospera fata_ smiled. Then “Jurares superos intra mea vota teneri!” --a very antique sentiment. But the Christian faith of the despoiled and exiled bishop reasserts itself as the poem closes.[220] Did Hildebert also write the still more palpably “antique” elegiacs on Hermaphrodite, and other questionable subjects?[221] That is hard to say. He may or may not have been the author of a somewhat scurrilous squib against a woman who seems to have sent him verses: “Femina perfida, femina sordida, digna catenis. “O miserabilis, insatiabilis, insatiata, Desine scribere, desine mittere, carmina blandia, Carmina turpia, carmina mollia, vix memoranda, Nec tibi mittere, nec tibi scribere, disposui me. “Mens tua vitrea, plumbea, saxea, ferrea, nequam, Fingere, fallere, prodere, perdere, rem putat aequam.”[222] With all his classical leanings, the major part of Hildebert was Christian. His theological writings which survive, his zeal against certain riotous heretics, and in general his letters, leave no doubt of this. It is from the Christian point of view that he gives his sincerest counsels; it is from that that he balances the advantages of an active or contemplative life, the claims of the Christian _vita activa_ and _vita contemplativa_. Yet his classic tastes gave temperance to his Christian views, and often drew him to sheer scholarly pleasures and to an antique consideration of the incidents of life. How sweetly the elements were mixed in him appears in a famous letter written to William of Champeaux, that Goliath of realism whom Abaelard discomfited in the Paris schools. The unhappy William retreated a little way across the Seine, and laid the foundations of the abbey of St. Victor in the years between 1108 and 1113. He sought to abandon his studies and his lectures, and surrender himself to the austere salvation of his soul, and yet scarcely with such irrevocable purpose as would rebuff the temperate advice of Hildebert’s letter proffered with tactful understanding.