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124 interdicting a course of procedure which from being un authorised was viewed almost in the light of rebellion. To the indignation of the rest of the scholars who had been glad enough to exchange the formal, if weighty, instruction of their old master for lectures into which Abailard threw all the energy and fresh vigour of his intellect, the course was suppressed; the interloper judged it wise to return to Paris. His stay at Laon had only proved to him in his own mind, that no learning, no eminence, was beyond his power: envy, he said, expelled him; rivalry was now out of the question.

Abailard's reception at Paris confirmed his self-conceit. The former enmity there had vanished; only his reputation was remembered. He seems to have been at once made a canon of Notre Dame: he resumed his lectures and became again the most popular teacher of his day. While he was thus in the zenith of his career fate suddenly turned against him: he quitted the cathedral and entered the religious life in the abbey of Saint Denis; for the future he would be dead to the world. The circumstances of this crisis are familiar to all readers, whether of history or romance; and a good deal of mischief has been done by the solemn reproofs of the one, and the sentimentalities of the other, class of writers. Abailard himself, our sole informant of the particulars of his love for Heloïssa, was a man whose self-reliance, as we have said, required that every act of his should seem to be a skilfully devised link