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Gerard extended much longer ( Epist. lib. iv. ep. 38). Although any confidential intercourse between Anselm and Gerard would seem to have been rendered impossible by the decided line each took in the dispute regarding investiture, their correspondence is not wanting in dignified courtesy. Before it was recognised that Anselm's return was indispensable to the English church, letters had passed between them practically effecting a reconciliation. Gerard, with the bishops of Lichfield, Norwich, and others, addressed a moving letter to Anselm entreating him to return at once as the only means of remedying the miseries under which the church was labouring (ib. lib. iii. ep. 121). On Anselm's return and the great settlement of the investiture dispute, the reconciliation seems to have been completed, and Gerard was the first of the six assistant prelates at the long-deferred episcopal consecration at Canterbury, 11 Aug. 1107, when no fewer than five bishops received the archiepiscopal blessing (, ii. 376;, iv. 77; , Gesta Pont. p. 117; . ii. 239). Gerard died 21 May 1108, at his palace at Southwell, when on his way to a council held in London to enforce clerical celibacy. He had been suffering from a slight indisposition. After dinner he went to walk in the garden attached to the palace, and after a little time lay down to sleep on a sunny bank, requesting his chaplains to leave him alone for a while. On their return he was dead. Under the cushion which had been his pillow was found a book by Julius Firmicus, a writer on judicial astrology, a science to which the archbishop was much devoted. His enemies interpreted his death, without the rites of the church, as a divine judgment for his addiction to magical and forbidden arts. Gerard had failed to secure the affections of the clergy or the people of his diocese. The funeral cortège was very scantily attended on its route, and on its entry into York it was not, as was customary, received in pomp by the citizens and the clergy, but by noisy boys who pelted the bier with stones. As the archbishop had departed without the last sacraments, the canons refused him interment within the walls of his cathedral, barely allowing him a turfed grave outside its doors. From this ignominious resting-place his body was transferred to the cathedral by his successor, Archbishop Thomas II. That Gerard was a learned man, an eloquent orator, and an able politician, there is no question. Thomas Stubbs says that he had few superiors in knowledge and eloquence, and William of Newburgh styles him clever and learned, epithets which are confirmed by William of Malmesbury. But he is charged by these authorities with covetousness and a licentious life, to which popular rumour added the practice of magical arts. Canon Raine says: ‘Gerard was a reformer and a successful politician, and in both these characters he would be sure to create enemies.’ Our chief knowledge of him is from ecclesiastical historians, from whom an unprejudiced verdict on one who so vigorously supported the regal against the pontifical power is hardly to be looked for. Two of Gerard's letters appear among those of Anselm (lib. iii. ep. 121, iv. ep. 39). Some Latin verses of no high poetical merit are preserved in a manuscript of the Cottonian collection (Titus D. xxiv. 3). He enriched the cathedral of York with five churches which were granted him by Henry I, one of which, Laughton, was constituted a prebend.

[Raine's Fasti Eboracenses, containing references to all original authorities; Eadmer, Hist. Nov. (Rolls Ser.); Gervase of Canterbury, Chron. ed. Stubbs (Rolls Ser.); William of Malmesbury, De Gestis Pont. (Rolls Ser.); Hoveden, Chron. ed. Stubbs (Rolls Ser.); Florence of Worcester, Chron. (Engl. Hist. Soc.); Symeon of Durham (Rolls Ser.)]  GERARD, ALEXANDER, D.D. (1728–1795), theological and philosophical writer, born at the manse of Chapel of Garioch, Aberdeenshire, 22 Feb. 1728, studied at Marischal College, Aberdeen, and was licensed as a preacher of the church of Scotland in 1748. Two years later he became a professor of philosophy in Marischal College, following the old arrangement, by which each professor had to conduct the students over several branches of study. This arrangement was founded on the notion that logic ought to be the first study, and that its principles ought to be applied in the study of all other branches; but Gerard in 1755 published an acute pamphlet, in which he advocated a modification of the arrangement of studies, and prepared the way for the abolition of the old system.

In 1756 he gained a prize offered by the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh for the best essay on taste, and in 1759 this work was published. Its fundamental definition is that taste consists chiefly ‘in the improvement of those principles which are commonly called the powers of imagination,’ including the sense of novelty, sublimity, beauty, imitation, harmony, ridicule, and virtue. The work has thus a much wider scope than that which, according to modern ideas, belongs to the subject of taste. Under the sense of beauty Gerard gave a prominent place to the principle of association, in which he has been followed by Alison [see ]. 