Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/432

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speak of Anselm with the deepest reverence; but they say little of him beside the broad facts which lie on the surface of English history. Some of them directly refer to his special biographer for fuller accounts. In telling his story I find myself in the like case. I am tempted to refer once for all for the acts of Anselm to his Life as written in our own day by a master both of description and of comment. I could be well pleased to send my readers elsewhere to study Anselm the monk and abbot, and to concern myself only with his career as archbishop in our own land. But the earlier and the later career of Anselm hang together, and he has already made his appearance at more than one earlier stage of our own story. I must therefore attempt some general notice, though at less length than if the ground had not been thus forestalled, of the primate who came to us from Aosta, as his predecessor did from Pavia, and who, like his predecessor, made Bec a halting-place on the way to Canterbury.

In the life of Anselm a childhood and a manhood of eminent holiness are parted by a short time of youthful licence. The little child in his dream climbed his native mountains to seek for the palace of God on a Christian Olympos. He reported the idleness of the handmaids of his Lord; he sat at the feet of his Lord; he was refreshed by the steward of the divine household with a meal of the purest bread. The scholarly boy was so eager for the monastic life that he prayed for some