of their modern successors, the newspapers, is apt to be caught by outbreaks of student lawlessness rather than by the wholesome routine of academic life. Then we have the preachers of the time, many of them also professors, whose sermons contain frequent allusions to student customs; indeed if further evidence were needed to dispel the illusion that the mediaeval university was devoted to biblical study and religious nurture, the Paris preachers of the period would offer sufficient proof. “The student’s heart is in the mire,” says one of them, “fixed on prebends and things temporal and how to satisfy his desires.” “They are so litigious and quarrelsome that there is no peace with them; wherever they go, be it Paris or Orleans, they disturb the country, their associates, even the whole university.” Many of them go about the streets armed, attacking the citizens, breaking into houses, and abusing women. They quarrel among themselves over dogs, women, or what-not, slashing off one another’s fingers with their swords, or, with only knives in their hands and nothing to protect their tonsured pates, rush into conflicts from which armed knights would hold back. Their compatriots come to their aid, and soon whole nations of students may be involved in the fray. These Paris preachers take us into the very atmosphere of the Latin quarter and show us much of its varied activity. We hear the cries and songs of the streets-- Li tens s’en veit, Et je n’ei riens fait; Li tens revient, Et je ne fais riens-- the students’ tambourines and guitars, their “light and scurrilous words,” their hisses and handclappings and loud shouts of applause at sermons and disputations. We watch them as they mock a neighbor for her false hair or stick out their tongues and make faces at the passers-by. We see the student studying by his window, talking over his future with his room-mate, receiving visits from his parents, nursed by friends when he is ill, singing psalms at a student’s funeral, or visiting a fellow-student and asking him to visit him--“I have been to see you, now come to our hospice.”