of gold hung above
it with the words "Sylva Vitae."

At the age of ten the boy had passed far beyond Father Ambrose, and was
sucking the Abbey dry of its learning, like some second Abelard. In
the cloisters of Montmirail were men who had a smattering of the New
Knowledge, about which Italy had gone mad, and, by the munificence of
the Countess Catherine, copies had been made by the Italian stationarii
of some of the old books of Rome which the world had long forgotten.
In the Abbey library, among a waste of antiphonaries and homilies and
monkish chronicles, were to be found texts of Livy and Lucretius and the
letters of Cicero. Philip was already a master of Latin, writing it with
an elegance worthy of Niccolo the Florentine. At fourteen he entered the
college of Robert of Sorbonne, but found little charm in its scholastic
pedantry. But in the capital he learned the Greek tongue from a
Byzantine, the elder Lascaris, and copied with his own hand a great part
of Plato and Aristotle. His thirst grew with every draught of the new
vintage. To Pavia he went and sat at the feet of Lorenzo Vallo. The
company of Pico della Mirandola at Florence sealed him of the Platonic
school, and like his master he dallied with mysteries and had a Jew in
his house to teach him Hebrew that he might find a way of reconciling
the Scriptures and the classics, the Jew and the Greek. From the verses
which he wrote at this time, beautifully turned hexameters with a
certain Lucretian cadence, it is clear that his mind was like Pico's,
hovering about the borderland of human knowledge, clutching at the
eternally evasive. Plato's Banquet was his gospel, where the quest of
truth did not lack the warmth of desire. Only a fragment remains now of
the best of his poems, that which earned the praise of Ficino and the
great Lorenzo, and it is significant that the name of the piece was "The
Wood of Life."

At twenty Philip returned to Beaumanoir after long wanderings. He was
the perfect scholar who had toiled at books and not less at the study
of mankind. But his well-knit body and clear eyes showed no marks of
bookishness, and Italy had made him a swordsman. A somewhat austere
young man, he had kept himself unspotted in the rotting life of the
Italian courts, and though he had learned from them suavity had not lost
his simplicity. But he was more aloof than ever. There was little warmth
in the grace of his courtesy, and his eyes were graver than before. It
s