982 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
were none too busy for him to devote a little time to searching 
into the truths of philosophy. What an interesting picture 
that letter of his to John the Saracen presents. It is 
the fourth year of his exile, the third of his banishment from 
England, yet amid all the harrowing negotiations with Thomas 
a Becket, with the Pope and the Lords of Europe, he finds 
time to look over and correct the translation of Dionysius 
which the Saracen had sent to him and he asks him to finish it 
so that he can enjoy the full teachings of the work. Such was 
John’s appreciation. 
He lived in a time which was none too favorable to the 
classics; when the narrow religious bigotry was not yet dis¬ 
pelled as it is today, nor as it was a century and a half later 
in Italy. He was trying to reconcile the study of the classics 
with the teachings of religion—to make them serve a useful 
purpose in furthering those teachings just as today there is a 
movement to reconcile the discoveries of science with religion— 
to bring them to the support of Christianity. 
John was indeed a humanist when humanism was not in 
vogue^—when to uphold the classics meant to invite not mere 
silent indifference but the cutting sneers and jeers of a hostile 
public. Yet he did so willingly. Hot even the charge which 
is brought so often against the advocates of Latin and Greek 
to-day—that they uphold the classics because it is their occupa¬ 
tion—can be preferred against him. His occupation was po¬ 
litical and diplomatic—his leisure, alone, could he give to this 
subject. Unaffected, therefore, by hope of any material gain, 
actuated only by the sincere motive of “informationem veritatis 
et virtutis,” he went out of his way to champion the cause of 
the liberal arts. If he had come two or three centuries later 
he might have been considered one of the greatest leaders in 
the history of scholarship. Coming when he did, he has suf¬ 
fered the fate of other great men who have had vociferous 
successors. 
