Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 1.djvu/336

314 study of the classics. His work remains the best piece of Latin from an eleventh-century German.

Among German scholars of the period, one can find no more charming creature than Hermann Contractus, the lame or paralytic. His father, a Suabian count, brought the little cripple to the convent of Reichenau. It was in the year 1020. Hermann was seven years old. There he studied and taught, and loved his fellows, till his death thirty-four years later. His mind was as strong as his body was weak. He could not rise from the movable seat on which his attendant placed him, and could scarcely sit up. He enunciated with difficulty; his words were scarcely intelligible. But his learning was encyclopaedic, his sympathies were broad: "Homo revera sine querela nihil humani a se alienum putavit," says a loving pupil who sketched his life. Evil was foreign to his nature. Affectionate, cheerful, happy, his sweet and engaging personality drew all men's love, while his learning attracted pupils from afar.

"'At length, after he had been labouring for ten days in a grievous pleurisy, God's mercy saw fit to free his holy soul from prison. I who was his familiar above the rest,' says the biographer, 'came to his couch at dawn of day, and asked him whether he was not feeling a little better. 'Do not ask me,' he replied, 'but rather listen to what I have to tell you. I shall die very soon and shall not recover: so to thee and all my friends I commend my sinful soul. This whole night I have been rapt in ecstasy. With such complete memory as we have for the Lord's Prayer, I seemed to be reading over and over Cicero's Hortensius, and likewise to be scanning the substance and very written pages of what I intended to write Concerning the Vices—just as if I had it already written. I am so stirred and lifted by this reading, that the earth and all pertaining to it and this mortal life are despicable and tedious; while the future everlasting world and the eternal life have become such an unspeakable desire and joy, that all these transitory circumstances are inane—nothing at all. It wearies me to live.''"

Was not this a scholar's vision? The German dwarf reads and cares for the Hortensius even as Augustine, from whose Confessions doubtless came the recommendation of this classic. The barbarous Latin of the Vita is so uncouth