level with the street. The cold stones were
strewn with clean straw, on which several of his disciples knelt on
one knee, writing on the other, to enable them to take notes from the
Master's improvised discourse, in the shorthand abbreviations which are
the despair of modern decipherers.

The hall was full, not of students only, but of the most distinguished
men belonging to the clergy, the court, and the legal faculty. There
were some learned foreigners, too--soldiers and rich citizens. The broad
faces were there, with prominent brows and venerable beards, which fill
us with a sort of pious respect for our ancestors when we see their
portraits from the Middle Ages. Lean faces, too, with burning, sunken
eyes, under bald heads yellow from the labors of futile scholasticism,
contrasted with young and eager countenances, grave faces, warlike
faces, and the ruddy cheeks of the financial class.

These lectures, dissertations, theses, sustained by the brightest
geniuses of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, roused our
forefathers to enthusiasm. They were to them their bull-fights, their
Italian opera, their tragedy, their dancers; in short, all their drama.
The performance of Mysteries was a later thing than these spiritual
disputations, to which, perhaps, we owe the French stage. Inspired
eloquence, combining the attractions of the human voice skilfully used,
with daring inquisition into the secrets of God, sufficed to satisfy
every form of curiosity, appealed to the soul, and constituted the
fashionable entertainment of the time. Not only did Theology include
the other sciences, it was science itself, as grammar was science to the
Ancient Greeks; and those who distinguished themselves in these duels,
in which the orators, like Jacob, wrestled with the Spirit of God, had
a promising future before them. Embassies, arbitrations between
sovereigns, chancellorships, and ecclesiastical dignities were the meed
of men whose rhetoric had been schooled in theological controversy. The
professor's chair was the tribune of the period.

This system lasted till the day when Rabelais gibbeted dialectics by
his merciless satire, as Cervantes demolished chivalry by a narrative
comedy.

To understand this amazing period and the spirit which dictated its
voluminous, though now forgotten, masterpieces, to analyze it, even to
its barbarisms, we need only examine the Constitutions of the University
of Paris and the extraordinary scheme