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304 Prowe's Life of Copernicus. Oct. had taken a doctor's degree. Nevertheless, unsatisfied with all that Cracow, Leipzic, and Prague could teach him, he sold a portion of his patrimony, and equipped himself with the proceeds for a journey across the Alps. He returned, after four years of study at Bologna, bringing with him the diploma of a doctor of canon law. The brilliant prospects which his acquirements, his family connexions, and his known abilities held out before him, were abundantly, and with little delay, realised. As Bishop of Ermland, he attained, February 19, 1489, to the highest temporal as well as spiritual dignity of his native land. His care for his orphaned nephews was active, untiring, and judicious. That they should be provided for in the Church was a matter of course. The utmost required by the public conscience of the time was that they should be suitably prepared to occupy positions of which the privileges were kept more fully in sight than the responsibilities. This duty Bishop Lucas discharged with truly paternal zeal.

Nicholas Copernicus matriculated at Cracow towards the close of the year 1491. The reputation of the ' Jagellonian University ' stood then at its highest. Students flocked to it from all parts of Germany as well as from Hungary and Sweden ; a thousand auditors daily thronged the lecture-halls in St. Anne's Street, where the 'Æneid,' the ' Georgics,' and the ' Metamorphoses ' already competed for favour with the more austere attractions of Boethius ' De Consolatione,' Aristotle ' De Animâ',' Donatus, Priscian, and Franciscus Niger. Nor did they compete with the arms of rhetoric and the charms of style alone. Swords were sharpened, and bludgeons weighted, for the attack and defence of the new learning lately imported from Italy by the vagrant humanists, Filippo Buonaccorsi (Callimachus) and Conrad Celtes ; national animosities added virulence to scholastic debates; and the ill-named Alley of Brothers was the frequent scene of bloody frays between the Hungarian students of ' De Ente et Essentiâ,' and the German admirers of the ' De Officiis ' and the 'De Amicitiâ.' In such excesses we may be sure that Copernicus was no participator. His serious and profound intelligence was incapable of admitting, scarcely even of comprehending, the extravagances of folly and of faction. He imbibed, it is true, a considerable share of that enthusiasm for classical antiquity which an ardent band of neo-pagan renovators had almost raised to the dignity of a new worship ; but it was a regulated enthusiasm, such as animates, without enslaving, thought.

Of far greater importance, however, for the future work of