But peaceful is the nunnery,

And pleasant there thy life will be,

I love you, but,-

YVREL.

You love me not.

Oh God how piteous is my lot.

NOEL.

Now, now! Weep not, poor little maid.
Upon the long wolf haunted way

I fear you would be sore afraid.

And weary, weary, never gay

Is life on Father's wild bleak moors.

Wouldst have ME a dull boor of boors?

When here at court;—

(He looks eagerly around the hall, and continues),

See, only see!

There's Corisant of Telivit,

His doublet hath a villainous fit!

Saw'st how my new hose fitted me?

Come, dry these tears. Like me scorn woe.

List, there the hautboys sound, I go.

Chuck, one last kiss; for I loved thee.

The dance begins; dear heart, I go.

(As he departs the dancers' song begins)

(They continue the song; whilst Yvrel seeing Noel begin the dance with a fair maid, sinks down on a stool, with frightened sobbing. A nun enters the hall, and looks about it inquiringly.)

19

Harry S. Lewis.

MICHAEL SCOT AND SCHOLASTICISM.

"Qui fuit astrorum scrutator, qui fuit Augur,

Qui fuit Ariolus, et qui fuit alter Apollo."

-Abrincensis.

ARRY yourself back to the Middle Ages, to that period when Europe is emerging from the darkness which ensued on the fall of Rome. Frederick Barbarossa has come to the end of his triumphant reign, carrying down with him into the waters of the Seleph the Empire, theoretically the eternal unifying political power, the suzerain of kings, princes, and peoples. The Holy Church, headed by the Pope, more actually ramifies throughout Christendom, bending high and low to its service. The nations, except England, do not yet exist. France slowly is evolving a government under the Capets; Germany is a rebellious federation; free cities, Florence, Frankfort, and many others--manage their own political and commercial interests, like Athens and Corinth of old. The good Roman roads have fallen into decay; the kingdoms, the towns, even adjacent vills and manors hold little intercommunication. The Crusades neither unite nor as yet edify men; nothing tends to emancipate the Japhetic races from their narrow ignorance; the times brood dark and disjointed. All conditions combine to turn intellect from the physical world, to direct men's thought inward. Their reflections conduce to a growth of religious doctrine, they possess no other knowledge which might be increased. Among the general clergy and people this results in an intensely vivid realization of God, of future rewards and punishments; among the most intellectual, the "charter members" of the nascent universities, to a closely reasoned system of logical theology, purely academic, known as Scholasticism.

Through the mist of centuries we descry dimly some of the old Scholastics-Abelard, Duns Scotus, Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas Aquinas. Except for Abelard, Eloisa's Abelard, the names convey very little more than the idea of

In the very

disembodied intellect,―names once very great. In the Reign of Terror the sans culottes worshipped the goddess Reason; in their own bloody age the Schoolmen gained renown, when renown was the meed of few but kings and warriors; so that from all the land between Sicily and the Hebrides the young men flocked to hear them. And those young men learned: That Reason and God are correlative. A sensible doctrine, we say. But regrettably these Scholastics did not search for reason in a scientific spirit. They obtained it, not out of the earth and waters and stars, but from Aristotle. Distinguishing him as "The Philosopher," they accepted his statements, arguments, and mode of reasoning as absolutely just and correct, the very essence of pure truth beyond which no man could attain. But their object was not Aristotle; they aimed at the perfection of theology. To this end they employed as a means the deductive system of "The Philosopher." They made of the syllogism a great logical engine and delighted in lengthy concatenations of premises and conclusions. Their acute, subtle intellects often carried them too far into details of the unknown; witness their old question, "How many angels can stand on a needle's point?" The great Ultimate questions absorbed them too, they toiled ceaselessly over the nature of Divinity, Creation, Immortality-the writings of St. Thomas alone on such problems fill twenty-five large quartos. But the Scholastics lacked originality of conception, they merely elaborated. They aided to upbuild a theology which the half of Christendom presently cast aside, and the other half debased. Their most momentous conclusions counted for little more than nought. Curious, is it not, this waste of three centuries? Yet the cause of the futility is plain: the most brilliant minds had no new field-no art, no letters, no science.

What the Schoolmen knew concerning Aristotle they obtained through Latin translations. Obscurities misled, contradictions baffled them. Physical inaccessibility to the Greek commentators was accentuated by ignorance of their

language. But a new impulse came to fire again their zeal for philosophical study-came through the Arabians, an ancient Semite race of the East. The Arabians! what a world of the occult, the impenetrable, the mystic the name conjures up! of desert freedom, unfettered power, boundless wealth! No less remarkable than that irresistible wave of fanaticism which bore their crescent to the plain of Tours were their extensive commerce and learning. While London was yet a scraggly town, Baghdad on the Tigris had its schools and libraries, its gardens and palaces, its novelists, poets and philosophers. All the learning of the world centered in the Saracen civilization. The "Anatomy" of an early Arab physician was used at Oxford as a text book until the seventeenth century. The Mohammedan mathematicians developed the Hindu decimal system, invented algebra. Astronomy bears witness to their labors in its very nomenclature, as azimuth, zenith, nadir. But like true orientals, the Arabians revelled most in philosophy. They had early seized on Aristotle as the thinker whose mind seemed to compass the world, and commentators upon his physics and metaphysics toiled uninterruptedly in the east for half a thousand years. Averhoës, a Moor of Cordova, in the twelfth century penned the conclusive commentary, exegetical, philosophical. Dante ranks the swart Spaniard with the noblest of the classical world in the Divine Comedy; otherwise the obscurity of those great in abstruse learning has mantled him; our century knows him not. For the Schoolmen the work of Averhoë was a veritable thesaurusbut as unattainable as the treasure of gold at the foot of the rainbow.

Shortly a purveyor of this gold was found, who placed the treasure in a Latin chariot, and distributed it to the dialecticians at the Universities-Michael Scot. The world no longer knows his name; he is vanished like a spark on the waters. The lover of Dante or of the bonny Waverley novelist perchance remembers him. The Ghibelline poet has indeed scant respect for Michael Scot; places him in Malebolge with the false soothsayers:

"Michele Scotto, fu, che veramente

Delle magiche frode seppe il giuoco."

For in those days of ignorance and superstition whoever had knowledge beyond the ordinary, especially a dabbler in alchemy and astrology like Scot, rarely failed of being popularly deemed a devotee of the Black Art, and friend of the Cloven-footed. But hear what Sir Walter writes-the monk speaks in the "Lay of the Last Minstrel":

"In these far climes it was my lot

To meet the wondrous Michael Scot;

A wizard of such dreaded fame,
That when, in Salamanca's cave,
Him listed his magic wand to wave,

The bells would ring in Notre Dame!"

Strangely enough, Italy and Scotland have both nourished legends of this mystic man. To this day any work of great size and antiquity will be ascribed by the Scottish Border peasant to the Devil, Sir William Wallace, or "auld Michael." The warmer Italian legends are tinged no less with the weird and phantasmagoric. One series was woven into the Latin versions of the Arthur cycle, with that southern glamour of faery which the solid English rarely approach. Michael Scot becomes confounded with Merlin, and lives with Arthur and Fata Morgana a dreamy existence in a golden land within Mt. Etna.

"Fuit Ilium." Troy is gone; but Troy has existed; has endured; has accomplished great deeds. Captivated by these strange legends of Michael Scot, we forget that he lived and dwelt, as a man, among men. Scotch by birth, French by education, Italian by residence, Arabian in learning, he embodied all mediaeval culture and experience. At the University of Paris he completed the trivium and quadrivium so brilliantly that people called him "magister summus. In Sicily he was appointed tutor to Emperor Frederick II, Barbarossa's grandson; no doubt trained up that most intelligent and complex of mediaeval princes; played the Aristotle to the thirteenth-century Alexander. But the master-work