g the forces that tended to limit the arbitrary exercise of the
royal authority, the influence of the University of Paris is entitled to
a prominent place. Nothing had added more lustre to the rising glory of
the capital than the possession of the magnificent institution of
learning, the foundation of which was lost in the mist of remote
antiquity. Older than the race of kings who had for centuries held the
French sceptre, the university owed its origin, if we are to believe the
testimony of its own annals, to the munificent hand of Charlemagne, in
the beginning of the ninth century. Careful historical criticism must
hesitate to accept as conclusive the slender proof offered in support of
the story.[39] It is, perhaps, safer to regard one of the simple schools
instituted at an early period in connection with cathedrals and
monasteries as having contained the humble germ from which the proud
university was slowly developed. But, by the side of this original
foundation there had doubtless grown up the schools of private
instructors, and these had acquired a certain prominence before the
confluence of scholars to Paris from all quarters rendered necessary an
attempt to introduce order into the complicated system, by the formation
of that union of all the teachers and scholars to which the name of
_universitas_ was ultimately given.

If the origin of the University of Paris, like that of the greater
number of human institutions, was insignificant when viewed in the light
of its subsequent growth, the meagreness of the early course of
instruction was almost incredible to those who, in an age of richer
mental acquisitions, listened to the prelections of its numerous and
learned doctors. The _Trivium_ and the _Quadrivium_ constituted the
whole cycle of human knowledge. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric were
embraced in the one; music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy in the
other. He was indeed a prodigy of erudition whose comprehensive
intellect had mastered the details of these, the seven liberal arts, or,
to use a familiar line of the period,

Qui tria, qui septem, qui omne scibile novit.

But the ignorant pedagogues of the eleventh century gave place, in the
early part of the twelfth, to instructors of real merit--to Peter
Abelard, among others, and to his pupil Peter Lombard, the fame of whose
lectures attracted to Paris great crowds of youth eager to become
proficient in philosophy and

[Sidenote: The four nations