Orosius, like Prudentius, was a Spaniard, born in the fourth century, but his chief work was done in the fifth. We owe to him our knowledge of why it was that the Goths set themselves to prop the falling empire rather than to overthrow it. It was not in them, their leader thought, to take up the burden that would fall upon them if they destroyed the old framework of society. Orosius heard the story at Bethlehem from a citizen of Narbonne, who, like himself, was on a visit to St. Jerome. This citizen had heard the very words fall from the lips of Alaric's brother-inlaw and successor, Ataulphus.

On his way back to Spain, Orosius put in at Carthage and visited St. Augustine. The visit had consequences. The empire was breaking up. The pagan part of the population accused Christianity of being the chief cause of the calamity. Friends and foes looked for an answer to the charge. To meet it St. Augustine wrote that great book of his which we know as The City of God. The familiar hymn "We've no abiding city here," represents the tone and substance of that book. That part of the answer met the wants of Christians. Orosius, at St. Augustine's suggestion, wrote the other half of the answer. It was a compendium of universal history, designed to illustrate the statement on which it is founded, viz., that there were troubles before there were Christians; the ages of heathenism had known greater calamities still. This book became the accepted manual of history for the Middle Ages: Bede had it, Alcuin had it, and our own Alfred made it an English book, adding considerably to it in matters better known to him than to Orosius. No book in Leofric's collection, always excepting the Exeter Book, is of much greater interest when its history and its contents are taken together.

We turn from history to philosophy, from a Spaniard who knew Jerome and Augustine to a Roman who knew Theodoric and Cassiodorus. The palm of pathetic interest is borne by Boethius.

I say pathetic interest advisedly, for the life of Boethius ended in tragedy. To match his vicissitudes, the contrast of his beginning and his end, we should have to look to the times of Henry VIII., and then should have to accumulate upon his single head the sorrows of Sir Thomas More and Cardinal Wolsey, and, as far as it would go in the measure of Boethius's punishment, the tamer execution of Thomas Cromwell. Boethius, however, was long enough in prison to write the book that of itself would have made him

famous if he had written nothing else. The bare list of editions in the British Museum Catalogue, chiefly of this, his greatest work, runs, as Mr. Hodgkin has pointed out, to fifty pages.

This remarkable man is better known to us than any man of his time who comes into the story of the march of Philosophy. He was born at Rome, of an ancient Roman family; he was educated at Athens before Justinian had shut up the last school of philosophy, marking thereby the official end of Neo-Platonism.

He was a man of great and varied accomplishmentsphilosopher, theologian, musician, and mathematician. He had translated into Latin thirty books of Aristotle. His treatise on music was a text-book for centuries. He had himself been Consul at Rome, and lived to see his two sons Consuls also. He ranks, in the books, as a Neo-Platonist, but it was his ambition to harmonise and blend the philosophies of Aristotle and Plato. He early resolved to translate all the works of Aristotle and all the dialogues of Plato, and he lived to do a great deal towards the realisation of his aim. He is one chief source of the knowledge of Aristotle in the early Middle Ages.

"Through your translations," says his friend Cassiodorus, who was Theodoric's prime minister, or rather his secretary, "the music of Pythagoras and the astronomy of Ptolemy are read by the Italians; the arithmetic of Nicomachus and the geometry of Euclid are heard by the Westerns; the theology of Plato and the logic of Aristotle dispute in the language of Quirinus; the mechanical Archimedes you have restored in a Latin dress to the Sicilians, and whatever discipline or art fertile Greece has produced through the efforts of individual men, Rome has received in her own language through your single instrumentality."

By far the most famous of his writings was his book on the Consolation of Philosophy. Gibbon describes it as a golden volume, not unworthy of the leisure of Plato or Tully, but claiming incomparable merit from the barbarism. of the times and the circumstances of the author.

Its place in the Middle Ages is conspicuous and, in the highest degree, honourable. Asser, Alfred's friend and instructor, commented on it, and deeply interested his royal scholar in it, so that he turned it into English, as he did Orosius. In later days the celebrated Schoolman and truly Christian Bishop, Robert Grossetête, Bishop of Lincoln, wrote another commentary on it, and it was one of the first

books issued by Caxton when printing was established at Westminster.

Statius, Orosius, Prudentius, Boethius, all have a place in the present library, but all of them are represented by printed editions with no special history. Boethius alone, in folio, is found amongst the 132 books sold to the Bodleian in 1602; this, like the Missal parted with by the Dean and Chapter at the same time, may have been Leofric's. The other books here referred to have disappeared.

Leofric protected his gift to the Cathedral by a solemn imprecation, which, alas! lost its magic in later days. Si quis illum inde abstulerit eterne subiaceat maledictioni. Fiat, Fiat, a later hand has added, Confirma hoc deus quod operatus es in nobis. The Dean and Chapter of 1602 were not afraid, nor rent their clothes, but they gave up their treasures with prodigal economy, and illustrated one of the vicissitudes which befall a Cathedral library, the danger which has come when the question is provoked, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Such, then, was the Cathedral Library as Leofric founded it. These are the books that he bequeathed. It may fairly be said that the books, though few, are fit: in breadth of human interest, in literary value, in firm links with the best life of past days they hold their own in comparison with the larger collections of later times.

We will now look at the Library in a later stage.

The diligence of Dr. Oliver long ago provided us with an inventory, taken in the year 1327, which enables us to make an interesting comparison of the books as Leofric left them, and as the great mediæval Bishop, John de Grandisson, found them. There had been a considerable increase; the volumes were in number more than five to one. Fifteen Bishops, however, had come and gone, and two centuries and a half had intervened. There have come new editions of Prosper and Persius, Arator and Sedulius, Prudentius and Boethius; and natural history, which makes no figure in Leofric's library, is represented by a costly copy of Pliny; but the imagination is starved, there is no more poetry, there is instead canon law by the hundredweight.

This lack of poetry, between the eleventh and the fourteenth century, opens up a question of singular and suggestive interest, viz., the relation to literature of the amazing development of Gothic architecture.

In the very interesting and instructive summary of the characteristic features of the thirteenth century which Bishop Lightfoot embodied in the lectures which he

delivered before the members of the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh in 1874, he quoted from Notre Dame de Paris a suggestive remark made by a priest of the great Parisian church, who, pointing with his right hand to one of the earliest volumes issued from the Nuremberg press, and with his left to the huge Cathedral, standing out dark and sphinx-like against the star-lit sky, exclaimed, "This will be the death of that; the book will kill the building."

The same anecdote, in precisely the same application, is found in Mr. Ferguson's History of Architecture. A thought presented to us by two such vigorous and independent minds demands careful attention. Let us see how Bishop Lightfoot works it out. He is describing the marvellous efflorescence of faculty that characterised the thirteenth century, and his attention is caught by the spectacle, everywhere in England, of architecture creating "stone poems."

He speaks of a succession of "architectural marvels"; it was "as if the world had shaken itself, and throwing off the slough of age had clothed itself with a white robe of churches." He speaks of the period comprised within the lifetime of Edward I., that is, from 1239 to 1307, and thus sums up its achievements :—

"The Cathedral at Salisbury was amongst the earliest works of the period, the Choir work of Henry d'Estria at Canterbury among the latest. And spanning the interval you have Exeter and Wells and Ely and Peterborough and Lincoln and Westminster and York and Lichfield and S. Albans and Norwich and Hereford-in several cases the greater part, in others the most remarkable of the building features."

He then glances at the parallel development in North France, and finds the period "unapproachable."

"This age, as we shall see presently, was very far from devoid of literary aspirations. It was characterised by extraordinary educational activity. Its metaphysical acuteness and logical subtlety could bear comparison with those of any time, ancient or modern. Its chronicles, though not exhibiting the highest type of history, are not to be despised. But, as a vehicle of the imagination, literature had not yet got a footing in England. Indeed, from the nature of the case, this was hardly possible. Imaginative literature requires a language full, flexible, at once popular and refined. But the alternative offered at this time was inadequate for the purpose. The old literary language, Latin, 2 Lectures, p. 154.

1 Vol. i. p. 543.

was fast deteriorating-the Latin of the thirteenth century is confessedly inferior to that of the eleventh and twelfth. The literary language of the future, the native English, was still rude and unformed; it had not yet been taken up by the cultivated classes. It is said, I know not with what truth, that there is no evidence that any one of our three first Edwards could speak a word of English. A whole century was needed after England was recovered for the English before the language was so far developed, that the master genius of Chaucer could mould it to the higher purposes of poetry.'

"In the thirteenth century," he goes on to say,2 2 "the temple or the cathedral was the most effective form in which creative genius could appeal to the public. The stone book was the most easily deciphered, the most widely read, the most importunate and selfasserting form of poetry. In the England of the thirteenth century it was, as we saw, not only without an equal, but without an antagonist. Hence imagination wrote down all her poetic thoughts in masonry-grave and gay alike-her highest effusions as well as her most serious communings; for what else are the grotesque carvings which sometimes appear in such strange company with the most solemn subjects, but the mopings and mournings of the age, the cynicisms, the satires, possibly even the scepticisms, of the medieval mind, the imagination seeking relief in some freak of merriment or some grin of sarcasm?"

We must resign ourselves, then, to the conditions under which, in these centuries, men laboured at literature. "You must not ask me," said the French statesman last year to the English ambassador, "for the impossible." "Such as I have," said even an apostle, "give I thee." The age of the transformation of the Cathedrals wrote its poetry in stone, and waited patiently the coming of Dante for the renaissance of poetry in written language.

It will be convenient to glance at the list of fifteen Bishops who fill the space between Leofric and Grandisson, to dwell briefly upon the chief intellectual and spiritual movements of the time, and then, in the light of these considerations, to look again at the books in the Library when the "Inventorium" is made.

Osbert, the second Bishop of Exeter, like the first, had been Chaplain to the Confessor, and was present at the dedication of Westminster Abbey in the year before the Conquest. In 1073 he was consecrated at St. Paul's by Lanfranc. He, too, was English in sympathy, as his predecessor was. It is plain that he did not care for the 2 Ibid., p. 152.

1 Lectures, p. 150.