Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/114

96 exciting presence of Abailard tended to give Paris a permanent importance as a seat of learning. The natural pugnacity of youth gathered crowds of students to a scene where an endless encounter was going on, in their several lecture-rooms, between the heads of the opposing parties. Paris became the centre of the dialectical struggle, and in another generation we see it filled with the noise of a new populace of schools set up in every part by ambitious teachers. But the schools of William of Champeaux nourished only with their master. We are not even certain who occupied his place at Notre Dame; for it is only a hazardous guess that identifies his successor with b Robert of Melun: nor is the celebrity of Saint Victor, where the later years of William's life as a teacher were passed, any the more connected with him. He left the priory, on his elevation to the see of Châlons [1112], a name for dialectic: but that which made the enduring reputation of the abbey (c it obtained this dignity in the year of his removal, or the year after) was something quite different. It was an impulse of reaction from the dialectic movement, due to the presence among its canons of Hugh of Saint Victor. The spirit which Hugh infused was more theological and religious, less instinctively literary, far less secular. This was the stamp of the mystics of Saint Victor which long remained their common tradition; but it was not the legacy of William of Champeaux.

The two other great schools of France have this likeness to William's, that they were rigorously realistic; but in neither were dialectics the main interest of the place in the way they were at Paris. Of the school of Laon we know little besides its renown. Its history is comprised within the lifetime of the brothers Anselm and Ralph, whose celebrity attracted scholars from all parts of western Europe. At one time we see a band of clergymen from Milan, the rival of Rome, prouder in her religious tradition than any other church in Christendom, journeying to Laon that they might sit at the feet of the