t, like that which, in the days of Henry III., John Balliol
established at Oxford for the maintenance of poor scholars, but soon
increasing in magnitude and distinction. The great college set up by
St. Louis' confessor at Paris for the endowment of scholars, desirous
of studying the unlucrative but vital subject of theology, was soon
imitated by the chancellor of Henry III. Side by side with Robert of
Sorbon's college of 1257, arose Walter of Merton's foundation of 1263,
and twenty years later Bishop Balsham's college of Peterhouse extended
the "rule of Merton" to Cambridge.

The academic movement was not all clear gain. The humanism, of the
twelfth century was crushed beneath the weight of the specialised
science and encyclopaedic learning of the thirteenth. We should seek in
vain among most theologians or the philosophers of our period for any
spark of literary art; and the tendency dominant in them affected for
evil all works written in Latin. Even the historians show a falling
away from the example of William of Malmesbury or of Roger of Hoveden.
The one English chronicler of the thirteenth century who is a
considerable man of letters, Matthew Paris, belongs to the early half
of it, before the academic tradition was fully established, and even
with him prolixity impairs the art without injuring the colour of his
work. The age of Edward I., the great time of triumphant scholasticism,
is recorded in chronicles so dreary that it is hard to make the dry
bones live. Walter of Hemingburgh, the most attractive historian of the
time, belongs to the next generation: and his excellencies are only
great in comparison with his fellows. Something of this decadence may
be attributed to the falling away of the elder monastic types, whose
higher life withered up from want of able recruits, for the secular and
mendicant careers offered opportunities so stimulating that few men of
purpose, or earnest spiritual character, cared to enter a Benedictine
or a Cistercian house of religion. Something more may be assigned to
the growing claims of the vulgar tongue on literary aspirants. But the
chief cause of the literary defects of thirteenth century writers must
be set down to the doctrine that the study of "arts"--of grammar,
rhetoric and the rest--was only worthy of schoolboys and novices, and
was only a preliminary to the specialised faculties which left little
room for artistic presentation. Science in short nearly killed
literature.