Page:Historical Essays and Studies.djvu/472

460 inappreciable reservoir of curious knowledge has been too much neglected in favour of books always familiar to students of the growth of erudition. For Mabillon belongs to the family of pioneers, and his is one of the best and best-known names in the line of discoverers, from Valla and Sigonius to Borghesi and Morgan, who have made history a science. Plis branch of the order admitted study as a sub-genus of manual labour. Blameless providers of raw material, they placed texts above facts and facts above thoughts. He himself paid heavy tribute to the humble cumulative purpose which was still the foremost need in that stage of knowledge. He slaved in the mine, and belongs, one half of him, to the useful but unostentatious army of editors, compilers, and transcribers. But although disciplined and repressed by the strict reform of St. Maur, he rose above his brethren to be, as an historian, eminently solid and trustworthy, as a critic the first in the world ; and his thoroughness and individuality brought on disputes in which he was as often right as any man who embarks in much contention.

The portrait here given is taken from these characteristic controversies more than from the study of his greater works. He is heard speaking to contemporaries, not addressing the future. His work was confined to those centuries, from St. Benet to St. Bernard, during which the Benedictine order was the foremost association in Christendom, and a leading force in; the civilisation of the West. History, as he found it, was shrouded in fable. Others were content, in reverent indifference, to accept the fable with the fact, and shrank from the coarse touch which dispels illusions and gives sterile and unaccommodating fact for religion in poetic garb. Mabillon undertook to rescue the work of his founder from the reproach of uncertainty, to bring it out of cloudland into shape fit for daylight, to carry the machinery of positive knowledge into the darkest and most doubtful of the ages of faith. Historical criticism was reduced to an art for the sake and honour of the Benedictines. Mabillon's first care was for the title-deeds of his order. Nobody before him had