as a book bishop's chaplains; and from the library of the episcopal CHAP. II. residence the author of the De Causa Dei enriched the His exertions pages of his treatise. A certain community of error between collector. the bishop and his chaplain would, indeed, suggest that they drew from common stores, for both are to be found referring in their writings to a sorry poem, De Vetula, as the work of Ovid'. In accumulating his collection, with all the advantages of royal sanction and his own high position, the English prelate had spared no effort. His agents explored the chief towns of France, Germany, and Italy. He had himself conducted the search in Paris and among the more important monasteries in England; and at the magic of his gold, many a religious house and many a foundation school had yielded up from its dark recesses and from mouldering chests some neglected, half-forgotten volume, gnawed by the mice, eaten by the moth and the worm, and covered with mildew and with dust. bequeathed to Durham, Trinity Col It is gratifying to find that, unlike many libraries that His library have represented the literary zeal of a lifetime, the stores afterwards which Richard of Bury had collected were not scattered lege, Oxford. at his death. At the close of the thirteenth century the monks of Durham had founded for their order at Oxford a college, first known as Durham and afterwards as Trinity College, and to this foundation he bequeathed his library3. The society was required to preserve the volumes in chests, and the rules laid down for their use and preservation are interesting as affording the earliest instance of the existence of the pledge system in our universities, and also as another 1 Among other apocryphal books and writers whom Bradwardine cites, besides, of course, the omnipresent Dionysius, we have the Vacca of Plato, the Pamander of Hermes, and the Secreta Secretorum of Aristotle. 2 Some of these books, on the dissolution of the College by Henry VIII, are said to have been transferred to Duke Humphrey's Library, and some to Balliol College. Macray, Annals of the Bodleian, p. 5. The University Library at Oxford was menced in 1367, on the funds and com valuable collection bequeathed by for its pre servation. CHAP. II proof of the extent to which the regulations that obtained Regulations at Paris were reproduced at Oxford'. Five scholars deputed by the master of the Hall were to have the custody of the books, of whom the entire number, or three, but not fewer, were competent to lend the volumes for use and inspection only; no volumes were to be allowed to go beyond the walls of the Hall to be copied or transcribed. No book was to be lent to any but the scholars of the Hall unless there was a duplicate in the library, and then only when security had been given exceeding the value of the book itself. The scholars were allowed free access to the library and use of the books, the scholar's name and the day on which he took away any volume having been duly registered". Character of the culture of the fourteenth century. The lives of the three eminent men whose labours we have thus briefly reviewed, all terminated at but a short 1 The regulations prescribed by Richard of Bury appear to have been almost identical with those of the Sorbonne. M. Victor de Clerc, after describing the latter, says, 'L'évêque de Durham, dans la donation qu'il fait de ses livres, in 1344, à l'université d'Oxford, reproduit presque littéralement les mêmes articles, et admet aussi, avec de sages restrictions, le principe du prêt. Déjà vers la fin du xe siècle les livres de l'église cathé drale de Clermont pouvaient être prêtes à des particuliers. L'évêque de Caraillon, Philippe de Cabassole, en 1372, n'interdit à personne l'usage de ceux qu'il légue à son chapitre; mais il veut qu'ils soient enchaînés.' État des Lettres au Quatorzième Siècle, 1 345. M. Cocheris (I quote Mr Hand's translation) remarks as follows:They (the regulations of the Sorbonne) are more minute than those of the bishop of Durham, but do not materially differ from them. The first article prescribes a system of pledges, and the second directs the election of the custodian or librarians by the socii. These two fundamental articles are to be found in Richard of Bury's scheme and are its essential features. It is therefore quite impossible not to perceive the imitation. It is, besides, easy to explain this borrowing by Bury from the Sorbonne. His literary taste, and the high position which he occupied in the literary world, gave him easy access to this institution, where, once admitted, he would not fail to visit the library and learn from its officers the rules for its management.' Critical Notice, prefixed to the Philobiblon, p. 37. 2 Philobiblon, c. xix. The amount of illustration this treatise has recently received at other hands renders a more lengthened notice here, less necessary. Professor Morley has given a careful epitome of its contents in his English Writers, Vol. II pt. 1, pp. 43-57. Dean Hook has also happily touched on some of its most interesting features in his life of Bradwardine, (Lives of the Archbishops, Vol. IV). The original work has been elaborately edited by M. Cocheris, (Paris, 1856,) from the MSS. at the Imperial Library of Paris, with valuable biographical, bibliographical, and literary excursuses; there is an American translation of this edition (Albany, 1861), to which the editor has added the English translation by John B. Inglis, (London, 1832); this latter translation is a very inaccurate performance. I have used the MS. in the Harleian Collection, No. 492, which appears in some respects superior in accuracy to those to which M.Cocheris had access. interval from the close of the half century. Richard of CHAP. II. Bury died at his palace at Auckland in the year 1345; William of Occam, in exile at Munich, in 1347; Thomas Bradwardine, after holding the see of Canterbury for a few months, was carried off by the prevalent epidemic, the plague of Florence, in 13491. While recognising the peculiar excellence of each, we must be careful lest their conspicuous merit blind us to the real character of the age in which they lived. There have been writers who, with that caprice which is to be met with in every age, however superior to preceding times, have professed to believe that the England of the fourteenth century excelled the England of the sixteenth"; but a very cursory glance through the pages of the Philobiblon suffices to show us that the author, enthusiast though he undoubtedly was, had formed no very hopeful estimate of the culture and the men of his own day. The censures of Bacon, which have already occupied our attention, are forcibly corroborated by Richard of Bury when he tells us how he is endeavouring to remedy the almost universal ignorance of grammar by the preparation of ma 1 Dr Lechler has distinguished the scope and bent of Bradwardine's writings from those of his great contemporary in the following pregnant sentences: Bradwardinus enim, si quid videmus, neque doctoribus illis scholasticis adnumerandus est, qui fidelissimi interpretes atque strenui patroni Romanæ medii ævi ecclesiæ omniumque etiam errorum ejus defensores extiterunt, neque illis viris, qui Romæ adversarii in publicum prodierunt, sive, ut Occamus, imperii nomine cum sacerdotio pugnam committebant, sive doctrina disciplinæque Romanæ capita quædam oppugnabant. Bradwardinus neque in Romæ decreta et instituta ita juraverat, ut Romam Romæ causa veneraretur, neque ullo modo consilium cepit arma Romæ inferre. Nihilominus sententia illa de gratia Dei per Christum gratis salvante et peccatores justificante, quæ medulla quasi Bradwardini fuit, cum Romanæ ecclesiæ minime omnium convenit. Imo doctrina illa eadem est, quæ a Reformatoribus tessera data, ecclesiæ The students of the time, as described of Bury. CHAP. II. nuals for the students,-when he contrasts the ardour of antiquity in the pursuit of learning with the superficial impatience that marks the cultivation of letters among his contemporaries,--and especially when he thus characterises, in language which might almost pass for a passage from the Opus Tertium, the prevalent characteristics of the students who composed the great majority at Oxford and at Paris:— and forasmuch as,' he writes, 'they are not grounded in by Richard their first rudiments at the proper time, they build a tottering edifice on an insecure foundation, and then when grown up they are ashamed to learn that which they should have acquired when of tender years, and thus must needs ever pay the penalty of having too hastily vaulted into the possession of authority to which they had no claim. For these, and like reasons, our young students fail to gain by their scanty lucubrations that sound learning to which the ancients attained, however they may occupy honorable posts, be called by titles, be invested with the garb of office, or be solemnly inducted into the seats of their seniors. Snatched from their cradles and hastily weaned, they get a smattering of the rules of Priscian and Donatus; in their teens and beardless they chatter childishly concerning the Categories and the Perihermenias in the composition of which Aristotle spent his whole soul'.' His testimony to the of the mendi In no way less emphatic is his testimony to the decline of degeneracy the mendicant orders, whom he describes as altogether busied with the pleasures of the table, the love of dress, in which they disregarded all the restrictions of their order, and with the erection of splendid edifices. Amid all their wide-spread activity, learning was falling into neglect; they still proselytised with undiminished vigour, but they no longer helped on the intellectual progress of the age. There is indeed one passage which, taken in its isolated sense, might seem to in- CHAP. II. dicate that he regarded the Mendicants with high favour,—it is that wherein he bears testimony to the aid he had received from them in his researches, and to the invaluable literary stores of which their foundations were the repositories; but on a comparison of these encomiastic expressions with other portions of the Philobiblon it will be seen that the praise belongs rather to the workers of a prior generation, and modifies but very slightly the impression conveyed in other portions of the treatise. teries superseded by the as centres of It is however but just to notice that the religious orders, The monasand more especially the monastic foundations, were already universities beginning to feel the effects of influences beyond their con- education. trol. We have already seen' that the decline of the episcopal schools on the continent has been attributed, whether rightly or not, to the superior attractions of the universities, and it would certainly seem that Oxford and Cambridge must be regarded as to some extent the cause, the innocent cause, of the similarly rapid decline of the monastic orders in popular estimation in England. Without denying that, from the inherent defect of their constitution, those orders must in all probability have degenerated, just as all other orders had degenerated in every preceding age, we may yet allow that their fate overtook them with more rapid strides owing to the correspondingly rapid encroachments made by the new centres of learning upon their province as instructors of the people, and to the loss of that occupation which, amid their many shortcomings, had given something of dignity to their office. Warton appears to us to have here pointed out the Warton's connexion of cause and effect very justly:-'As the universities,' he says, 'began to flourish, in consequence of the distinctions and honours which they conferred on scholars, the establishment of colleges, the introduction of new systems of science, the universal ardour which prevailed of breeding almost all persons to letters, and the abolition of that exclusive right of teaching which the monasteries had so long claimed; the monasteries, of course, grew inattentive to stu1 See pp. 68-71. explanation. |