cere delight in every form of
natural beauty. Like him, he lived beneath the habitual sway of
fountains, meadows, hills and groves; with him he saw the 'splendor
in the grass' and the 'glory in the flower.' He could 'feel the
gladness of the May' and rejoiced in 'the innocent brightness of a
new day.'"

In the matter of science as distinct from poetic interest in nature,
quite as much can be said for Dante. This greatest of Italian poets is
a fair example to take of the university man of the thirteenth century
in this respect. He was thirty-five before the first century of
university existence properly so-called closed. He may be considered a
typical product of university life. It is true he had had the almost
inestimable advantage of the schooling and culture of his native
Florence, where at the end of the thirteenth century there were more
children, it is said, in attendance at the schools to the number of
the population than there is at the present moment even in most of our
American cities. Brother Azarias in his Essays Educational, [Footnote
43] said:

[Footnote 43: Essays Educational, by Brother Azarias, with Preface by
His Eminence Cardinal Gibbons. Chicago, D. H. McBride & Co., 1906.]

"In the thirteenth century, out of a population of 90,000 in Florence,
we find 12,000 children attending the schools, a ratio of school
attendance as large as existed in New York City, in the year of Grace
1893." This ratio, it may be said, is as great as is ordinarily to be
found anywhere, and this fact alone may serve to show {345} how
earnest were these medieval burghers for the education of their
children. Dante had the advantage of this, and in addition, of the
training at two or three of the universities at least of Italy,
besides spending some time at Paris, and probably a visit at least to
Oxford.

Lest it should be thought that perhaps Brother Azarias gave too
favorable an estimate in his account of the schools in Florence,
though he quotes as his authority Villani, and other authorities are
readily available, it seems worth while to give a very interesting
reference to this subject of education in one of the notes in Prince
Kropotkin's chapter on Mutual Aid in the Medieval City, from his book
Mutual Aid a Factor in Evolution, a work that we have placed under
contribution a number of times already in this attempt to picture
medieval conditions as they were in reality, and not in the foolish
imaginings of o