Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 1.djvu/281

CHAP. XI kinder notice, a certain Lombard Guido, who died where he was teaching in Auxerre, in 1095, and was lamented in leonine hexameters: "Alas, famous man, so abounding, so diligent, so praised, so venerated through many lands—

"'Filius Italiae, sed alumnus Philosophiae."

Let Gaul grieve, and thou Philosophy who nourished him: Grieve Grammar, thou. With his death the words of Plato died, the work of Cicero is blotted out, Maro is silent and the muse of Naso stops her song."

A final instance to close our examples. In the middle of the eleventh century flourished Anselm the Peripatetic, a rhetorician and humanist of Besate (near Milan). In his Rhetorimachia he tells of a dream in which he finds himself in Heaven, surrounded and embraced by saintly souls. Their spiritual kisses were still on his lips when three virgins of another ilk appear, to reproach him with forsaking them. These are Dialectic and Rhetoric and Grammar—we have met them before! Now the embraces of the saints seem cold! and to the protests of the blessed throng that Anselm is theirs, the virgins make reply that he is altogether their own fosterling. Anselm gives up the saints and departs with the three. This was his humanistic choice.

This rather pleasant dream discloses the conflict between Letters and the call of piety, which might harass the learned and the holy in Italy. Distrust of the enticements of pagan letters might transform itself to diabolic visions. Such a tale comes from the neighbourhood of Ravenna, in the late tenth century. It is of one Vilgard, a grammarian, who became infatuated with the great pagan poets, till their figures waved through his dreams and he heard their thanks and assurances that he should participate in their glory. He foolishly began to teach matters contrary to the Faith, and in the end was condemned as a heretic. Others were infected with his opinions, and perished by the sword and fire.