interval from the close of the half century. Richard of Bury died at his palace at Auckland in the year 1345; William of Occam, in exile at Munich, in 1347; Thomas Bradwardine, after holding the see of Canterbury for a few months, was carried off by the prevalent epidemic, the plague of Florence, in 1349'. While recognising the peculiar excellence of each, we must be careful lest their conspicuous merit blind us to the real character of the age in which they lived. There have been writers who, with that caprice which is to be met with in every age, however superior to preceding times, have professed to believe that the England of the fourteenth century excelled the England of the sixteenth; but a very cursory glance through the pages of the hilobiblon suffices to show us that the author, enthusiast though he undoubtedly was, had formed no very hopeful estimate of the culture and the men of his own day. The censures of Bacon, which have already occupied our attention, are forcibly corroborated by Richard of Bury when he tells us how he is endeavouring to remedy the almost universal ignorance of grammar by the preparation of na

* Dr Lechler las distin mished the scope and bent of brady ardine's writings from those of 1 is great contemporary in the following progs ant sentences: "Bra Iwardinus chip, »i quid videmus, peque dueteribue illis scholasticis ndi operardus est, qui filesomi interpretes alique strenui Jatrom Roma a medu ævi creless a cmmun qu'eti in errorum «us des fen ores extiterunt, neque aitas viris, qui Roma adversarit in publicum prodierunt, sive, ut Ocentijns, imperii Domine cumi », cerdotioj u 2011 €¢ M• mittel int, sive doctrina

nipue Roman, e 6, jota quod im op. 14 tit. I radwar lpos de que in letin gecreta et instituta ita juras verat, ut im. m lon (Pavone rvetur, neque não modo co?» lum est art. Rome un forte. Nl. 19. Most sententin ia de prata Di Jer Christum gratis was ante et pre 9×1 Bri awariati, fu t, com kva eclexa morin e chium envesit. In o doctrina illa en ictu es', que a liferatonil us tessera data, eccitalm

The students

of the time

as described

card

of Bury.

CHAP. IL nuals for the students,-when he contrasts the ardour of antiquity in the pursuit of learning with the superficial impatience that marks the cultivation of letters among his contemporaries,-and especially when he thus characterises, in language which might almost pass for a passage from the Opus Tertium, the prevalent characteristics of the students who composed the great majority at Oxford and at Paris:and forasmuch as,' he writes, 'they are not grounded in their first rudiments at the proper time, they build a tottering edifice on an insecure foundation, and then when grown up they are ashamed to learn that which they should have. acquired when of tender years, and thus must needs ever pay the penalty of having too hastily vaulted into the possession of authority to which they had no claim. For these, and like reasons, our young students fail to gain by their scanty lucubrations that sound learning to which the ancients attained, however they may occupy honorable posts, be called by titles, be invested with the garb of office, or be solemnly inducted into the seats of their seniors. Snatched from their cradles and hastily weaned, they get a smattering of the rules of Priscian and Donatus; in their teens and beardless they chatter childishly concerning the Categories and the Perihermenias in the composition of which Aristotle. spent his whole soul'.'

ITis testimony to the degeneracy

of the mendl

cant orders.

In no way less emphatic is his testimony to the decline of the mendicant orders, whom he describes as altogether busied with the pleasures of the table, the love of dress, in which they disregarded all the restrictions of their order, and with the erection of splendid edifices. Amid all their wide-spread activity, learning was falling into neglect; they still proselytised with undiminished vigour, but they no longer helped on the intellectual progress of the age. There is indeed one

1 Philobiblon, c. 9.

Sed (proh dolor) tam hos quam alios istorum sectantes effigiem, a paterna cultura librorum subtrahit triplex cura: cura superflua; ventris viz. vestium, et domorum. Sic sunt enim (neglecta Salvatoris providentia, quem Psalmista circa pauperem et mendicum promittit esse solicitum)

circa labentis corporis indigentias occupati, ut sint epulæ splendidæ, vestesque contra regulam delicatæ, necnon et ædificiorum fabricæ, ut castrorum propugnacula, tali proce ritate, quæ paupertati non convenit exaltatæ. c. 1. Querimonium Librorum contra Religiosos Mendicantes.

se, might seem to in- AP IL with high favour,-it

the aid he had received to the invaluable litewere the repositories; iastic expressions with will be seen that the of a prior generation, and ssion conveyed in other

that the religious orders, foundations, were already 4.ences beyond their con

e decline of the episcopal atributed, whether rightly

s of the universities, and
si and Cambridge must be
ase, the innocent cause, of
* mastie orders in popular
denying that from the in-

n, these ordets must in all
st as all other orders had
ge, we may yet allow that

re rapid strides owing to
nents made by the new
-nce as instructors of the

tion which, amid their thing of dignity to their Jave here pointed out the justly:-As the univerin consequence of the dis. conferred on scholars, the «uction of new systems of prevailed of breeding abolition of that exclu» monasteries had so long w inattentive to stu

CHAP. IL dies which were more strongly encouraged, more commodiously pursued, and more successfully cultivated in other places; they gradually became contemptible as nurseries of learning, and their fraternities degenerated into sloth and ignorance. It will devolve upon us, at a somewhat later stage in our enquiry, to point out how a like decline awaited the prestige of the mendicant orders, the penalty of their own arrogance and bigotry.

Lull in the
Intellectual

Universities

In bringing to a close our retrospect of the intellectual activity of the activity of England at this era, a yet more important decline even than that of the monastic and mendicant orders presses itself upon our notice and demands some explanation. How is it, that from the middle of the fourteenth century up to the revival of classical learning, the very period wherein the munificence of royal and noble founders is most conspicuous in connexion with our university history, such a lull comes over the mental life of both Oxford and Cambridge, and so few names of eminence, Wyclif and Reginald Pecock being the most notable exceptions, invite our attention? From the death of Bradwardine to the first battle of St. Alban's, more than three quarters of a century intervene, during which no adequate external cause of distraction appears which may be supposed to account for the comparative Wood's criti- inertness of the universities. The observation of Anthony bartial Wood, already quoted, that, after the time of Wyclifthe of the act students neglected scholastical divinity and scarce followed

explanation

any studies but polemical, being wholly bent and occupied in refuting his opinions and crying down the orders of mendicant friars,' presents us with a true but only a partial explanation. Other causes were at work, some of which will be best explained in a subsequent chapter, but it can hardly be questioned that the most baneful effects in the fourteenth century are to be traced to the bias given to the studies then pursued. Ating The shortcomings and excesses indicated by Bacon constituted the prevailing characteristics long after his time, and the absorbing attention given to the civil and canon law was undoubtedly one of the most fruitful sources of those evils. It

devotion to

the civil

law.

1 Dissertation on Introduction of Learning into England, p. cxiii. ed. 1840.