Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/200

182 on Priscian and two metrical treatises, one a grammar, the other a glossary of rare words. It will not escape notice, as evidence of the breadth of training then demanded from scholastics, that hardly one of John's masters was lecturing on the subject which he had chosen for special and mature study: their general acquirements were such as to enable them to give competent instruction in almost any branch of what we may call the customary academical curriculum. In the later centuries of the middle ages such an experience would rarely indeed be attainable.

By the time at which John had now arrived he had ceased to be a mere pupil; he was also a private student, and a teacher as well. Since, he says, ''I received the children of noble persons to instruct, who furnished me with living—for I lacked the help of friends and kinsfolk, but God assuaged my neediness,—the force of duty and the instance of my pupils moved me the oftener to recall what I had learned. Wherefore I made closer acquaintance with master Adam, a man of exceeding sharp wits and, whatever others may think, of much learning, who applied himself above the rest to Aristotle: in such wise that, albeit I had him not to my teacher, he gave me kindly of his, and delivered himself openly enough; the which he was wont to do to none or to few others than his own scholars, for he was deemed to suffer from jealousy.'' Adam of the Petit Pont was an Englishman who ultimately became bishop of Saint Asaph. He had his surname from the school which he afterwards set up on the little bridge connecting the City of Paris with what was perhaps already known as the Latin Quarter. John had a genuine respect for the logician, whose name he once associates with those of Abailard and Gilbert of La Porrée, as of the scholars to whom he owed most in this department of learning. But his opinion of Adam in his public capacity was very different. Adam's book, the Art of Reasoning, he says, was generally considered