Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/157

 of the time. Granting that, it is at least pleasant to find that amidst the great and varied mass of literary remains there is so very little, hardly anything, that would show the prevailing tone to have been coarse or base. There is some profanity, not a little hardness and narrowness, but very little indeed of the foolish and inconvenient jesting which later on becomes the mark of all courtly literature.

If now we were to imagine a foreign scholar visiting England at the period of which we were speaking, either, like Mabillon or Pertz, making an Iter Anglicum to collect materials for history, or like Solon simply, θεωρίης εἵνεκεν, to see what the world was like, or like the admirable Crichton to air his own erudition and try the mettle of English scholars in literary tournaments, or like John of Salisbury to gather all the knowledge that he could, how would he fare? He would land, we suppose, at Dover and be lodged in the Benedictine Priory there, where he would find that his visit was recorded among the visits of kings and ambassadors in a precious chronicle that embodied the annals of all public events and copies of public documents; then he would go on to Canterbury, where he would find himself at once in a great literary centre, with teachers and libraries and all appliances that stand to the population and society of the day in much the same proportion as the literary life of Oxford or Cambridge would at this moment. He would find Gervase, the sacrist, busy over the chronicles of the kings and the history of his own time; Nigel writing his verses, polishing the great medieval satire Burnellus, or inditing the prose letter in which he castigates the faults of the secular clergy; a monk in a strictish convent, but corresponding with the ministers of a powerful and politic court: there too he would find Odo the prior, a great theologian, William the sub-prior and Edward Grim, biographers of S. Thomas; if he came after 1186 he would find the whole convent busily writing Latin letters, letters in very fair grammatical Latin, garnished with quotations from Ovid and Lucan and the laws canon and civil. If he went on to Rochester, there he would be entertained by Archdeacon Paris, the nephew of Robert Pullus, possibly a