Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/17

Rh a scholastic distinction, and of many poets-laureate, the King merely selected one to publish his praises and to attend his court. It was simply a university degree.

The origin of degrees, as is the establishment of the universities by which they were conferred, is involved in considerable obscurity. Such institutions have no type in the classic era. As Christianity prevailed over Paganism, the schools connected with cathedral churches, and afterwards with monasteries, became the sole nurseries of general education. When Bishops became temporal lords and monks accumulated wealth, those seminaries were neglected; and scholars eschewing the rule of their negligent masters, withdrew from their several societies and themselves opened independent places of teaching. In this way the University of Paris had its origin.

These establishments were encouraged and prospered. Nobles endowed them and kings granted immunities; but though schools of universalia studia, as had been the cathedral and monastic seminaries, it was long before they were erected into universities or corporations; and this word University we first find applied to the school at Paris, in a decretal of Pope Innocent III., dated the beginning of the thirteenth century. They then obtained powers of self-government and of conferring degrees of honour and precedence within their several republics. These degrees which at first were only the old distinction between teacher and scholar became civil honours, were conferred with great pomp, and were in some cases placed on a par with nobility itself. "When a Bachelor was created Master," says Wood, "the Chancellor gave him the badges with very great solemnity, and admitted him into the fraternity with a kiss on his left cheek using then these words, 'En tibi insignia honoris tui en librum, en cucullum, en pileum, en denique amoris mei pignus, osculum; in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sanctus.' That being