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The great University of Paris, which through- 

 out the Middle Ages had been the heart of 

 Christendom, the centre of its life and heat, 

 which in the fourteenth century was at its 

 splendid culmination, and which had meddled with 

 no feeble hand even in the State, was waning 

 jeven in the fifteenth century, when France was 

 devastated by war and rapine and her schools 

 were emptied. This University, which had savagely 

 condemned Joan of Arc, and sent Nicholas Midi to 

 preach a solemn sermon at the stake, "pro Joannse 

 salutari admonitione et populi sedificatione," in the 

 sixteenth century came out of the religious wars 

 stripped of its endowments, and deserted by its 

 students ; its curriculum was crassly conservative, 

 its philosophy buckram, its theology a petrifac- 

 tion ; its forty colleges were closed, grass grew 

 in its courts, and its public disputations were 

 abased to the decorous apostasy of the freethinker. 

 Montpellier was dominated by realism (vitalism). 

 Francis Bacon had done better to have gone 

 with Harvey to Padua; almost in the year of 

 the publication of the De motu cordis, the Par- 

 liament of Paris issued an edict that no teacher 

 should promulgate anything contrary to the ac- 

 cepted doctrines of the ancients. 



