ALEXANDER NECKAM. 121 



The boys, after the manner of foster brothers in those 

 days, grew up together until the difference in their 

 stations moved them asunder. The Prince went to the 

 wars the subject to the schools. Perhaps the royal favor 

 followed the young student, for we find him a distin- 

 guished professor at the University of Paris when but 

 twenty- three years of age: and a member of the school 

 which had been established by his countryman, Adam du 

 Petit Pont, which was celebrated for the subtleties of its 

 disputations. Here, he tells us, he both studied and 

 taught the arts rhetoric, poetry, civil and canon law, 

 Biblical criticism and medicine: an odd combination from 

 a modern point of view. Then he returned to England 

 and became master of the Dunstable school; but he evi- 

 dently had less taste for teaching than for learning, and 

 the books, the congenial companionship, the literary at- 

 mosphere to be found only in the monasteries, became 

 an overpowering attraction to the scholar, who felt, as 

 many another of like kidney has felt since, that he was 

 made for better work than hammering a parrot-like 

 knowledge of the Trivium into boys whom the Assize of 

 Arms was enrolling in the new militia as quickly as they 

 were able to wield a lance. 



So he wrote to the Abbot of St. Benedict, seeking ad- 

 mission into* that order; for of all monks, the Benedictines 

 were, in pursuance of the injunctions of their founder, 

 most devoted to letters. 



"Si vis veniam : sin autem, etc." (If you wish I will 

 come : if not, etc.) ran his missive, with a curtness and a 

 shade of hauteur worthy of his royal nursemate. But the 

 witty Abbot had a pat answer, and a pun besides, ready at 

 hand : 



"Si bonus es, venias : si nequam, nequaquam." (If you 

 are good for something, you may come : if not, don't.) 

 The u nequam" and "Neckam" were perilously alike: 

 too nearly so for the sensitive spirit of the would-be monk; 

 so he turned his back on Benedict's house and made favor 



