Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/201

Rh to have been written with a wilful obscurity of language: although his friends and advocates ascribe this to subtilty, most have explained it as proceeding from the folly or arrogance of a vain man. Adam's pupils of course exaggerated his faults. They gloried in their own inventions and had a great contempt for their elders. Adam encouraged them, having, it should seem, a purely mercenary principle of teaching. He used to say that he would have few hearers or none if he propounded dialectic with that simplicity of terms and easiness of sentences, with which it ought to be taught. John emphatically disclaims being the pupil of such a man. I was, he adds immediately, ''his familiar, by constant intercourse and exchange of books, and by almost daily discussion upon such topics of discourse as sprang up. But I was his disciple not for one day.''

Thus before the end of five years of student life John was already entering on the career of a teacher: but to his earnest mind this resolve necessitated a further training at least equally extended. He returned to Paris and applied himself to the study of theology. The language in which he relates this movement leaves no doubt that the interval between his attendance on William of Conches and his masters in divinity was not all spent at Paris. For part of it he may have remained at Chartres; the spirit of that school has left an impress upon his mind so deep and uneffaceable that we cannot be persuaded but that his residence there was continued as long as possible; although a reference in a letter which he wrote in later years to Peter of La Celle has suggested the conjecture that he lived some time at Provins and perhaps Rheims. Paris however was already tending rapidly to become the intellectual metropolis of Europe and a poor man like John would be sure to turn his steps thither in the hope of getting employment, for it was poverty that arrested him in the middle of the Quadrivium course to which he had been introduced by Hardwin and Richard. From hence, he says, I was withdrawn by the straitness of my