h century our
own Alcuin (as the school of Freeman would affectionately call him) is no
less fierce. All plays are anathema to him, and he even disapproves of
dancing bears--though not, it would appear, of bad puns: _'nec tibi sit
ursorum saltantium cura, sed clericorum psallentium.'_[2]

The banning of _all_ literature you will find harder to understand; nay
impossible, I believe, unless you accept the explanation I gave you. Yet
there it is, an historical fact. 'What hath it profited posterity--_quid
posteritas emolumenti tulit,_' wrote Sulpicius Severus, about 400 A.D.,
'to read of Hector's fighting or Socrates' philosophising?' Pope Gregory
the Great--St Gregory, who sent us the Roman missionaries--made no bones
about it at all. '_Quoniam non cognovi literaturam,_' he quoted
approvingly from the 70th Psalm, '_introibo in potentias Domini_':
'Because I know nothing of literature I shall enter into the strength of
the Lord.' 'The praises of Christ cannot be uttered in the same tongue as
those of Jove,' writes this same Gregory to Desiderius, Archbishop of
Vienne, who had been rash enough to introduce some of his young men to
the ancient authors, with no worse purpose than to teach them a little
grammar. Yet no one was prouder than this Pope of the historical Rome
which he had inherited. Alcuin, again, forbade the reading of Virgil in
the monastery over which he presided: it would sully his disciples'
imagination. 'How is this, _Virgilian!_' he cried out upon one taken in
the damnable act,--'that without my knowledge and against my order thou
hast taken to studying Virgil?' To put a stop to this unhallowed
indulgence the clergy solemnly taught that Virgil was a wizard.

To us, long used as we are to the innocent gaieties of the Classical
Tripos, these measures to discourage the study of Virgil may appear
drastic, as the mental attitude of Gregory and Alcuin towards the Latin
hexameter (so closely resembling that of Byron towards the waltz) not far
removed from foolishness. But there you have in its quiddity the
mediaeval mind: and the point I now put to you is, that _out of this soil
our Universities grew._

We, who claim Oxford and Cambridge for our nursing mothers, have of all
men least excuse to forget it. A man of Leyden, of Louvain, of Liepzig,
of Berlin, may be pardoned that he passes it by. More than a hundred
years ago Salamanca had the most of her stones torn down to make defences
against Wellington's cannon