268 Epidemics. 



is scarcely necessary to say that from 568, or rather 537, 

 there is scarcely a man in Europe of an enlarged mind, and 

 possessing a real love of liberty, learning, or of wise adminis- 

 trative capacity, saving what is held as a birthright from the 

 customs and manners of the nation or the tribe to which 

 they belonged, that can be found from this date 537 to 

 1177. 



Henry Beauclerk, or Henry I., is said to have had a love 

 of learning rather than its possession, noo, and he gave a 

 kind of spur to learning, as historians tell us ; but who were 

 those that found him a patron of learning is more a matter 

 of assertion than of illustration. But it is evident that his 

 love of learning was so exceptional in those days that any 

 man who could have composed, after the days of Boethius, 

 anything equal to " Jack and Jill," or the tale of the " Cow 

 with the Crumpled Horn," would have been handed down to 

 posterity as the patron of learning, and the producer of 

 superior rhythm in verse for the age in which he lived. 

 Percy and Hallam, before this date (1177), can scarcely give 

 us one verse of superior, if equal, rhyme to the two samples 

 indicated. It was in this age of darkness that the Saracen 

 stood foremost among the nations. 



To rob the Saracen of his natural intellectual superiority, 

 it is said that they borrowed largely from the Romans, but 

 especially from the Greeks ; and much of their apparent 

 superiority arose from how they availed themselves of the 

 learning of their predecessors in the republic of literature 

 and science. Yet it must be observed that the early 

 portion of the Saracenic conquests was marked by a people 

 who viewed all learning contrary to the Koran as heretical, 

 and all that was not opposed to it as unnecessary, for it 

 contained all that man required ; hence the burning of the 

 Alexandrian Library, and the general rejection of learning 

 of a foreign origin till a later period. 



