of her bed with fear."

All this information was the common property of the period; Richard of
Berbezilh, for instance, an "aesthetic" troubadour, tells us that--like
a still-born lion's cub which was only brought to life by the roaring of
its dam--he was awakened to life by his mistress. (He does not say
whether it was by her roaring.) Conrad of Wuerzburg compares the Holy
Virgin to a lioness who brings her dead cubs, _i.e._, mankind, to life
with loud roaring. Bartolome Zorgi, another troubadour of the same
period, likens his lady to a snake, for--he explains--"she flees from
the nude poet and her courage only returns with his clothes." During the
whole mediaeval period the unicorn was a well-known symbol of virginity,
more especially of the virginity of Mary. The _Golden Smithy_ of the
German minnesinger, afterwards monk Conrad of Wuerzburg, contains a
rather abstruse poem which begins:

The hunt began;
The heavenly unicorn
Was chased into the thicket
Of this alien world,
And sought, imperial maid,
Within thine arms a sanctuary.... etc.

Natural history was in a parlous state, and geographical knowledge was
equally spurious. The Church was averse to natural research, for the
only problem in the world was the salvation of man from everlasting
damnation. Not only Tertullian, but several Fathers of the Church,
regarded physical research as superfluous and absurd, and even as
godless. "What happiness shall be mine if I know where the Nile has its
source, or what the physicists fable of heaven?" asked Lactantius. And,
"Should we not be regarded as insane if we pretended to have knowledge
of matters of which we can know nothing? How much more, then, are they
to be regarded as raving madmen who imagine that they know the secrets
of nature, which will never be revealed to human inquisitiveness?" Here
one is reminded of a remark made in "Phaedros" by _the wisest of all
Greeks_, who refused to leave town because "what could Socrates learn
from trees and grass?" And Julius Caesar wrote an account of his wars to
while away the time when he was crossing the Alps.

Very likely the system of the Church would have been less rigid had it
not largely been occupied in dealing with ignorant barbarians. In the
case of Celts and Teutons, a complete and unassailable form of dogmatics
with its corollary of hieratical intolerance was the only possible
system. The traditions of these peoples were far too fo