may speak.
The French jurists were famed for their supreme excellence all over
Western Europe. In the thirteenth century Brunette Latini wrote his
most famous work, the _Livres dou Tresor_, in French, because it was
_la parleure plus delitable, il plus commune a toutes gens_ ("the most
delightful of languages and the most common to all peoples"). Martin
da Canale composed his story of Venice in French for the same reason,
and Marco Polo dictated his travels in French in a Genoese prison.
When St. Francis was sending the brothers to establish the order in
distant lands, he himself chose France, but was dissuaded by his
friend, Cardinal Ugolin. "When inebriated with love and compassion for
Christ," says the writer of the _Speculum_, "and overflowing with
sweetest melody of the Spirit, ofttimes would he find utterance in the
French tongue; the strains of the divine whisperings which his ear had
caught he would express in a French song of joyous exultation, and
making the gestures of one playing a viol, he would sing in French of
our Lord Jesus Christ."

Never in the history of civilisation were men possessed with such
passion for the spiritual life or such faith in the reasoning faculty
as in the thirteenth century in Paris. The holiest mysteries were
analysed and defined; everywhere was a search for new things.
Conservative Churchmen became alarmed and complained of disputants and
blasphemers exercising their wits at every street corner. The four
camel-loads of manuscripts, the works and commentaries of Aristotle,
brought by the Jews from Spain--a monstrous and mutilated version
translated from Greek into Arabic and from Arabic into Latin--became
the battle-ground of the schools. The Church at first forbade the
study of Aristotle, then by the genius of Aquinas, Christianised and
absorbed him; his works became a kind of intellectual tennis-ball
bandied between the Averroists, who carried their teachings to a
logical consequence, and the more orthodox followers of Aquinas. For
three years the faculty was torn asunder by the rival factions. Siger
of Brabant, whose eternal light Dante saw refulgent amid other doctors
of the Church in the heaven of the Sun, was an Averroist; Siger--

"Che leggendo nel vico degli strami
Sillogizzo invidiosi veri."[71]

[Footnote 71: Par. X. 136. "Who lecturing in Straw St. deduced truths
that brought him hatred."]

The Rue du Fouarre (Straw), where Siger taught and perhaps Dante
st