should arrange for us in a complete life of Tennyson. To Sir Edwin Arnold he once said: "Dead languages are embalmed; but when languages endure, they change. The time will come when you and I, Arnold, will be as difficult for Englishmen to read and understand as Chaucer is to-day." But I would hope that, as we can readily understand the English of our Authorised Version (except a few dozen obsolete words), now 286 years old, so our Victorian poets will for at least two centuries to come be fully intelligible, and even over a wider area than to-day, because our noble tongue is the most international of languages.

I fear that I have wearied you by the abundance of quotation, but I hope you will search Tennyson for yourselves, and notice the beauties of his Nature-Studies, some of which I have brought before you. His many speculations on the future of man and of the Cosmos do not enter into my syllabus. But it seems to me that, as I have dealt to-night with the Microcosm of this earth alone, I ought to give you Tennyson's latest message to thoughtful men concerning the Macrocosm, a quotation in which I have taken the liberty of altering two words, in order to make plainer the poet's meaning :—

Many an æon moulded earth before her highest,
Man, was born;

Many an æon, too, may pass when earth is manless

And forlorn

Far away beyond her myriad coming changes earth will be Something other than the wildest modern guess of you and

Only He who made us meant us to be mightier by and by

Set the sphere of all the boundless Heavens within the human

eye,

Sent the shadow of Himself, the boundless, through the human

soul

Boundless inward in the atom, boundless outward in the Whole.

BOLOGNA.

"BONONIA MATER STUDIORUM.” *

By A. THEODORE BROWN.

THERE are two great types of University now flourishing in Christendom. One type, that including Oxford and Cambridge, grew up first in Paris. The other, vigorous as it is found to-day throughout Germany and Scotland, and (much nearer our own doors) at Manchester or Liverpool, first took shape in the matrix of Bologna. A brief recital of the circumstances of its birth, and a still rougher account of its early stages of development, limit the scope of this paper.

At the outset must be remarked the profound difference between the two intellectual movements that commenced on either side the Alps at about the same date, viz., the first century of the second millennium of the Christian era. North of the Alps it was a clerical and monastic movement, as the names of Lanfranc, Anselm, and Abelard § serve to remind us; to the south it proceeded from the laity, and not from the laity in general so much as from lawyers in particular.

Even during the nightmare of the barbarian invasions Italy had remembered something of the ancient Roman culture, and the Roman code never ceased to be enforced by Ostrogoths and Lombards in disputes where Italian subjects alone were affected. Nor had the Latin classics, notwithstanding their paganism, wholly ceased to be read in schools directed not by priests but by laymen. And if the * Legend on early coins. † 1005-1089 A.D. 1033-1109 A.D. § 1079-1142 A.D.

Р

*

civilian who was trained there had been hitherto none too sure of a career, he found his opportunity when republics sprang up in the principal cities of Lombardy, Emilia and Tuscany. It was just at this point that Irnerius, a native of Bologna, made himself heard of far beyond its walls by his expositions of the Digest. As he was not the first to deliver such lectures there,t it is not clear how he came to be regarded as the founder of the great school of law that soon afterwards arose. The conjecture is that somehow, whether from Rome, from Pisa, or from Ravenna, a complete text of the Digest became first available in his time, whereas his predecessors had only a fragmentary MS. to work upon.

Here it may be convenient to distinguish between the different sections of the Corpus Juris. The Digest or Pandects formed the most important section compiled by Tribonian and his colleagues at command of the Emperor Justinian.‡

While the Institutes were no more than an introductory text-book, and the Code a collection of edicts, the Digest (to quote Gibbon's words ) extracted "the spirit of jurisprudence from the decisions and conjectures, the questions and disputes, of the Roman civilian." They embodied, one might almost say, an encyclopædia of social science. Neither encumbered by mere antiquarianism nor swollen by abstractions, they dealt with the actualities of a highly complex community. By clear and comprehensive definitions of the obligations between man and man, they made for liberty; while order they upheld by their very

* Viz., by 1100 A.D. There seems no evidence in support of the date 1088 A.D., assumed at the recent octocentenary celebrations of the University of Bologna.

Pepo was earlier.

+530-533 A.D.

& See Decline and Fall, vol. viii, chap. 44.

moderation. In a word, they aimed at bringing the State and the Individual to terms of mutual respect.

The shorter Roman law-texts had been used sometimes as literary exercises for schoolboys, but this great repertory of the Digest was too vast and technical for such a purpose. The lectures that now came to be delivered on every portion of it attracted a graver set of students, many of them of mature years and good position. They flocked. from all parts of Europe, Germany in especial, to one of the most accessible of cities.

The Emperor favoured a system of law which had derived its source from imperialism, and, as is well known, the four Bologna doctors* pronounced in favour of his extreme claims at the Parliament of Roncaglia in 1158 A.D. But, for all that, the law teachers as a body were far from turning their lecture-rooms into monarchical seminaries, or they would soon have been driven forth from their republican home. Indeed, the students were old enough to have formed opinions of their own. They had come for a practical purpose: they had come in order to be trained into lawyers. It was by the theory and practice of law they meant to push their fortunes. Some were young nobles, with hopes of advancement at court; some looked to be officials of city republics; some were ecclesiastics, coming for the most part, it would seem, from northern countries, where clerics absorbed the business of the advocate. Probably very few were poor. We must think of them as a collection of gentlemen, bent on bread-andbutter studies, and wasting little time on fanciful studies. If they were impelled by the underlying truth that at that juncture law was for the healing of the nations from disorder and ignorance, it was all unconsciously. Such exercises as logic and rhetoric were brooked, merely as Bulgaro, Martino, Ugo, Jacopo.

*