29 



engaged more of the time and passions of men 

 than for the house of Csesar to conquer and 

 govern the world ; one indeed which even in 

 our day and country is not wholly resolved. 

 The controversy lay between the Realists 1 and 



of due time, was first claimed as a Frenchman ; then, as 

 this "provenance" becomes untenable, he, and others, are 

 called "Anglo-French." The University of Paris in the xiith 

 century was no more France than Rome was Italy. In our 

 sedentary arable life we do not realise the nomad habits of our 

 forefathers. Edward the First would inhabit six distant ^ 

 castles in less than as many weeks; indeed Great Britain 

 itself was then no island. The heroes, nay the armies, of 

 Froissart's Story fly about the world in their seasons like 

 migrating birds. All keen scholars of the West went to 

 the University of Paris, the daughter of kings and popes, 

 and the intellectual centre not of a strip of kingdom between 

 Anjou and the Empire, but of Europe itself. And of the 

 scholars of Paris, Englishmen were, we hear, the most tur- 

 bulent, but the boldest in argument and the most greedy 

 of learning ; this last character perhaps it is that now-a-days 

 looks least English. Kuno Fischer admires the procession of 

 great Englishmen down the highway of medieval thought, 

 from Erigena to Francis Bacon. John was born at Salisbury, 

 spent thirteen of his early years at the University of Paris, the 

 best of them in the stormy service of Thomas Becket, and but 

 the last five as Bishop of Chartres. We do not call Lanfranc ^ 

 an Englishman, nor even Adrian the Fourth an Italian. 



1 The name Realism has been improperly used improperly 

 because previously engaged to signify the conception of an 

 objective world, from the play of which our impressions arise, 

 and of which our impressions are, if not likenesses, at any rate 

 symbols, as opposed to the name "Idealism" which, with a 

 like violence, has been turned to signify the conception that 



