SOURCE: Webb, Clement C. J. “The Policraticus of John of Salisbury.” Church Quarterly Review 71, no. 142 (January 1911): 312-45.

[In the following essay, Webb presents an overview of each of the books of the Policraticus.]

The appearance of a new edition of the Policraticus of John of Salisbury [Ioannis Saresberiensis Episcopi Carnotensis Policratici sive de Nugis Curialium et Vestigiis Philosophorum Libri VIII., edited by Clemens C. I. Webb, 1909] may serve as the occasion of putting before readers of the Church Quarterly Review some account of the principal work of a great Englishman, ‘the central figure of English learning’ in his time, as Bishop Stubbs has called him. Though the principal, the Policraticus is not in itself the most interesting of its author's writings. It has not the importance for the history of European culture of its sequel the Metalogicon, whence we may learn what were the methods and results of the philosophical teaching from the point of view of the most eminent representative of the short-lived humanistic movement, whose nursery was the school beside the cathedral church of Chartres of which John, who had studied there as a boy, was to die as the bishop. Nor has it the historical interest of the fragmentary Historia Pontificalis in which the hand of a contemporary especially well informed, endowed with a remarkably even-balanced judgement of men and things, master of an admirably simple Latin style, has painted for us the state of ecclesiastical politics at the time of the second crusade, the venality of the papal court, the moral laxity of high society in the crusading settlements in Syria and Palestine, the matrimonial disorders due to the combination of an unreasonably long list of prohibited degrees with a system under which numerous marriages within those degrees were let stand until it was for somebody's interest to get them annulled, and, in sharp relief against these dark shadows, the simple and straightforward goodness of the Pope Eugenius III, the friend and pupil of St. Bernard. There too are drawn, with a wonderfully delicate discrimination and sincere appreciation of the merits of two great men, the contrasted personalities of St. Bernard himself, with his keen scent for heresy in theological speculation and somewhat unscrupulous fashion of prosecuting the chase of it, and of Gilbert de la Porrée, the philosophical bishop of Poitiers, whose study of his famous predecessor St. Hilary had led him into unfamiliar thoughts concerning the doctrine of the Trinity. John had personally known them both, and in later days did what he could to effect their reconciliation, but without success; he remained, however, loyal to both, and felt assured that ‘now,’ as he says, (for both were dead when he wrote this), ‘they are agreed and gaze together upon the Truth which they desired.’ Again, not to speak of the elegiac poem Entheticus de Dogmate Philosophorum, with its satirical account under symbolical names of the most prominent figures in English politics during the reign of Stephen, a book which still awaits a competent editor, one might well prefer to the Policraticus John's correspondence. The letters which he wrote as secretary to Theobald give us a vivid impression of the varied business of the archiepiscopal court of Canterbury at that time; they are, however, mostly impersonal and official. But the ‘real letters,’ as Bishop Stubbs calls them, which he wrote in his own person later in life during the exile of his friend St. Thomas of Canterbury, are charmingly written, thoroughly alive, and full of information for those who would understand their author's world. Yet, after all, it is in the Policraticus that we have the fullest expression of John's mind, with its universal curiosity, steady common sense, wide and discriminating scholarship, strong moral convictions, genuine piety, and a lively English patriotism for which there remained no distinction of Norman and Anglo-Saxon, and which included a wholesome pride in the local traditions of Salisbury and Wiltshire, his native town and county; a patriotism, however, united with that profound attachment to the interests of the larger civilization of Christendom, which was the ground of his uncompromising adherence in the dispute between Henry II and Becket to the cause of the latter, far from blind though he was to the Archbishop's faults of temper and judgement. We see John here as above all else a humanist, possessed of a conception of the world of classical antiquity very limited, no doubt, in comparison with that of the scholars of the Renaissance, yet the same in kind as theirs, and singularly free from the fantastic distortion and false perspective so common among mediaeval writers, especially after the literary scholarship of the twelfth century had given way to the tyranny of the scholastic philosophy, when the Latin poets whom John knew so familiarly were almost forgotten in the preoccupation of the most thoughtful minds of the age with the speculative problems suggested by the physical and metaphysical treatises of Aristotle.

The Policraticus opens with a short dedicatory poem in which, following the example of Horace and Ovid, John addresses his book and bids it seek out the person to whom it is inscribed, Thomas the Chancellor (afterwards the murdered Archbishop), who was then with Henry II at the siege of Toulouse in 1159, and whose excellences are described in a somewhat hyperbolical strain; it is then to cross the Channel and take the road to Canterbury, where (it was hinted) it had been before and in great part written; here, no doubt in the library of the Cathedral monastery, to find a lasting home. What is in all probability the presentation copy of the work to Thomas has been made the basis of the text in the new edition. The identification of a twelfth-century MS. left to Corpus Christi College at Cambridge by Archbishop Parker as this very copy is due to the present Provost of King's, who found in it the press marks corresponding to those assigned in a fourteenth-century catalogue of the library of Christ Church, Canterbury, to that then included among the books of St. Thomas there preserved. As we read these introductory verses we have called up before us the picture of the traveller approaching the metropolitical city from the coast and catching sight afar off of the famous golden angel who, from his lofty station on the tower of the great Church, ‘surveyed the world, foretold the weather, calmed the sea, and sleeplessly protected from all evil those upon whom he looked down’; and in whom John recognized no less an angel than the Angel of the Great Counsel Himself, with a prayer to whom that He may enlighten with His Spirit the minds of all who fear the Lord, the prose preface which follows the introductory verses is soon to end. This preface is occupied with the praise of letters; and glances at a critic whom the writer does not name, though he threatens to do so unless he mends his ways, but whom in the meanwhile he is content to call Lanvinus after the ‘old poet’ against whom the prologues of Terence are directed and Cornificius after the detractor of Vergil. Cornificius and his hostility to the culture which John prized so highly reappear in the Metalogicon, but his true name still remains unrevealed.

The Policraticus has a second title, De Nugis Curialium et Vestigiis Philosophorum—Concerning the Trifling Pursuits of Courtiers and the Traditions of the Philosophers. The first five books are devoted to the former and the last four to the latter subject. The first form of courtly idleness which John castigates is the chase, and, though care must be taken here and elsewhere in disentangling what belongs to his own time from the mass of miscellaneous tradition in which it is embedded, there is a genuine sincerity, however conventional and traditional his language, in his denunciation of the mighty hunters of his day, who neglected their families and their estates for their sport, and of the cruel rigour of the forest laws, whereby the death of wild animals was revenged by the infliction of exquisite tortures on men. ‘They have not feared to destroy for a beast's sake a man whom the Only Begotten Son of God has redeemed with His own blood.’ He touches but lightly and without mentioning names, lest he should chafe the wounds of those who were still mourning their kinsmen, on the deaths of princes in the chase. From hunting he passes to gaming. Here he tells a story of the sage Chilon refusing to conclude a treaty with the Corinthians because he found the magistrates at dice, which Chaucer borrowed from John (with a slip in the name of the hero) in his ‘Pardoner's Tale,’ and which John seems, according to a marginal note in certain early MSS., to have taken with other tales from an otherwise unknown collector of such, named Catulus of Parma. Next to gaming comes music, and here we find him in sympathy with the Cistercian movement against an over-elaborate church music and commending the rule of ‘a venerable man, the father of about seven hundred nuns,’ no doubt his elder contemporary and countryman St. Gilbert of Sempringham, who forbade the sisters of his order (the only purely English religious order of the Middle Ages) to sing anything but plain-song. The actor and the conjuror of every sort next come under the lash, and the first book (which is a good illustration of the mediaeval puritanism familiar enough to students of the time, though ignored by such writers as Mr. Chesterton) ends with a grand display of the author's learning in the form of an enumeration of omens with illustrations from classical literature. He shews by his bantering tone that he does not take them seriously. It is said to be unlucky, he tells us, to meet a hare, especially if it runs away from you; and indeed, says John, a hare is more useful on the table than on the road.

The beginning of the second book finds him still occupied with omens, but in a more serious vein. The believer in omens and dreams is never free from care. Physical causes of sneezes and the like are to be sought rather than prophetic, meanings and medical remedies for disease rather than magical. It is true that saints have wrought cures by the use of holy things and signs; thus Cuthbert, a standard-bearer of our nation in the law of the Lord, healed sick folk by laying on them the book of St. John's Gospel; such actions are lawful, for they proceed from faith in God and are referred to His glory; but, these apart, we should lay aside with contempt all trust in occult indications of the future, relying on the text that ‘all things work together for good to them that love God,’ and leaving it to unbelievers to be, by God's permission, the sport of such delusions. For omens are effective just so far as they are believed in. Hence Julius Caesar's neglect of them is approved, and the story of his taking in a favourable sense his ominous stumble on landing in Africa is paralleled by one of St. Mark, who, when his shoe-string broke as he landed at Alexandria, gave thanks thereupon that he had come to his journey's end. But while omens are but vanity, there are trustworthy natural indications of the future not to be confounded with such idle prognostics; of this sort are the appearances in sun or moon, or the behaviour of birds and other animals, from which we may foretell changes in the weather. Some of these genuine signs are of universal, some of particular import. Instances of the latter are the portents which preceded the fall of Jerusalem, Josephus' account of which is transcribed at length from Rufinus' version of Eusebius, to which, by a natural transition of thought, are added those reported by Suetonius to have heralded the accession of Vespasian to the imperial authority. Signs of general or universal import are such as those which preceded the death of Christ and the ‘fifteen signs’ that, according to a current tradition—which has, however, as John notes, no foundation in canonical scripture—are to announce the approach of the Day of Judgement. Such signs are against nature, if by nature we mean the wonted course of things; not if (with Plato) we identify nature with God's will, for miracles are not causeless, but have secret causes; thus at Cana the long processes by which in the course of nature water becomes wine were compressed by divine power into a moment, we know not how. This view of the evangelical story is derived from St. Augustine. John dwells at some length on one special kind of sign—the prophetic dream. Following a fivefold division of dreams (which he found in Macrobius) he tells us that two of these, the insomnium (such as Dido's dreams about Aeneas) and the phantasma (such as the nightmare), are without signification; two are plainly significant, the somnium (such as the younger Scipio's, when a mere boy, of the destruction of Carthage—John says by a slip Numantia—or that by which certain Roman citizens are said to have learned, at the time of Christ's birth, of the mystery of the Incarnation) and the oraculum, in which the information comes from the mouth of some venerable personage who appears to the dreamer; such as we read of in the Aeneid, or as the angelical warnings to St. Joseph and the Magi, St. Peter's dream at Joppa, and Constantine's of the Apostles Peter and Paul. The fifth, the visio, when the sleeper sees openly or (more often) under the figure of something else, what will hereafter come to pass, is at least figuratively significant. Of the former sort was Alexander's vision of his own death at the hands of Cassander, seen before he ever saw his future murderer; of the second that of Julius Caesar, when, as Lucan tells us, ‘his quaking country's mighty form’ warned him, while still on the further bank of the Rubicon, against the guilt of civil war. The representation of Rome by a woman of more than human stature John illustrates by the legend (found also in the ‘Golden Legend’ and the old pilgrim's guide-book called Mirabilia Romae) of the image which the sculptor said ‘would last until a virgin brought forth a child,’ and which fell accordingly when Christ was born. But though we have in the accounts of significant dreams certain characteristics which may help us in the interpretation of them, John denies the existence of any genuine art of dream interpretation, and that those who, like Joseph and Daniel, were specially endowed with the gift of interpreting dreams, used any such. The apocryphal book which circulated as the Conjectorium of Daniel must thus be rejected. Art implies the use of reason, and there can be no art when reason is at a loss. Dreams are sent by spirits good or evil. That of which St. Augustine tells wherein a learned man dreamed that he instructed another in a difficult point, and the same night the other dreamed that he was so instructed; or that in which St. Jerome was, by his own account, scourged for being ‘no Christian but a Ciceronian,’ were sent by good spirits. The experiences of the ‘witches' sabbath,’ in which persons weak in understanding and in Christian faith think they have ridden after the queen of night and seen her court, and witnessed the stealing of children by her attendants, some to be devoured, others to be replaced in their cradles, are but dreams sent by spirits of a contrary nature. More dangerous because less easily cured than those fancies are the errors of the Mathematici, who follow the evil ‘mathēsis’ (which John distinguished from the good ‘mathēsis’ by lengthening the penultimate syllable) which, though based on the good, that is on genuine mathematical science, and following it in its study of the heavenly bodies, goes beyond it into a forbidden region by using the knowledge so gained as a means of prying into the future. The extreme point of their impiety is reached in their idolatrous doctrine that there might be fashioned by astrological rules the image of a man who might then be animated by the power of the stars and consulted as an oracle. A less reprehensible form of astrology does not ascribe divine power to the stars, but supposes that their motions are so ordered by the Creator that in them His determinations concerning the future can be read by those who have the skill. But ‘poison lurks under the honey’ even of this more plausible doctrine. Under the pretence of honouring God it excludes the freedom of the will and claims to know secrets which, by the express statement of the Son of God, the Father has kept in His own power. John is thus led on to deal with the famous question of free will and necessity. He argues that God's foreknowledge of the future imposes no more necessity on what is foreknown than does ours. God has an immutable knowledge of mutable things, as our minds have a non-spatial knowledge of spatial things. There is mutability in the objects of divine knowledge, but not in that knowledge itself; and Scripture has many instances of conditional foreknowledge, and even of conditional predestination. His discussion of further difficulties is acute and learned, but in the space here at our command could not be properly pursued. Where there seems an alternative between denying God's omniscience or contradicting an accepted philosophical principle, he would rather be thought illogical than heretical; yet he does not wish to contradict the accepted principle, and prefers to take refuge with Cicero in academic doubt. Speaking of Cicero, he describes him (taking the thought from Quintilian) as the glory of Latin literature who, by himself, can be compared or even preferred to all that ‘insolent Greece’ can boast. The phrase caught the attention of Ben Jonson, who twice copied it, once in his praise of Shakespeare in Underwoods, once in his praise of Bacon in his Discoveries. In this ‘transference to Bacon of a crown which he had made for Shakespeare’ (as one writer—whom we quote from memory—has put it), some have seen a proof of his discovery in the interval that the true author of the plays called Shakespeare's was no other than Bacon. But, as we see, the crown was not made either for Shakespeare or for Bacon, nor was Ben Jonson himself the maker: it was made by John of Salisbury for Cicero more than four hundred years earlier.

Before leaving the puzzles about necessity and contingency, John refers to a charlatan named Lewis, whom he met in Apulia, where he lingered in uncomfortable exile ‘in order to carry back with him into the Gauls the bones of Virgil’ (presumably for magical purposes) ‘rather than’ (what John would consider far more precious) ‘his meaning.’ This ‘modern Stoic,’ as John calls him, with reference to the ‘paradoxes’ in which the ancient Stoics delighted, had offered Thomas a great sum of gold if he would prove he could do what he was not, as a matter of fact, going to do by actually doing it. Such puzzles, says John, which rest on a disregard of the logical rules of opposition, do not really disprove the knowledge by God or man of things which yet are not necessary but contingent. Astrology then is for John a way of damnation, and every kind of divination falls also under his censure. The wickedness and folly of seeking information from wizards or their familiars is illustrated not only by the story of the witch of Endor and other scriptural and classical stories, but by a piece of contemporary history. Two years before Becket had accompanied King Henry on his expedition against the Snowdon Welsh, and had, it seems, consulted a soothsayer as to the event; the answer had, one may judge (though John, writing to one who knew the facts, leaves much untold), been encouraging, but the campaign ended in disaster, nay, in a few days, unwarned by any, the English host had lost one who was, as it were, its ‘morning star.’ This perhaps refers to the death in this expedition of Henry, son of Henry I by his mistress the Welsh princess Nest, grandmother of the historian Giraldus Cambrensis. The occasional correctness of the predictions given by soothsayers does not disprove the wickedness of consulting them; for it shews not the hand of God but the long experience of the evil spirits, who also sometimes express their own fears, as when the heathen gods foretold the end of idolatry, while sometimes, like the spirit of divination in the Acts of the Apostles, they speak under compulsion. John tells an interesting and characteristic story of his own childhood. A certain priest to whom he was sent to learn his Psalter indulged in the not even now extinct practice of consulting the magic crystal by means of an innocent child.

It happened that he made me and a boy somewhat bigger than I, after some wicked preliminaries, to sit at his feet and attend to the sacrilegious business of mirror-witchcraft, so that by our means there might be revealed to him what he sought either in nails smeared by some consecrated oil or chrism, or in the clean smooth body of a basin. When then after first uttering some names which seemed to me, by the horror I felt at them, child as I was, to be those of demons, and making some preliminary adjurations which thank God I do not know, my comrade had declared that he saw some shapes though but dim and cloudy, I for my part turned out so blind at this business that nothing was visible to me but the nails or basin and the rest of the things that I already knew to be there. So after this I was judged useless for this sort of thing and was condemned as a hinderer of this sacrilegious proceeding not to come near any such; and as often as they had resolved to engage in these practices I was shut out as an impediment to any divination. So gracious was the Lord to me in my tender age; and when I had grown somewhat older I came more and more to abhor this crime, and my abhorrence of it received a great confirmation from the fact that of many of whom I then knew that engaged in it, I saw all before they died bereft of sight either by disease or violence, not to speak of other troubles whereby the Lord overthrew or afflicted them before my eyes, with the exception of two only, the priest of whom I spoke above and a certain deacon who saw the judgements which awaited crystal gazers and fled, the one to the bosom of a church of canons, the other to the harbour of a Cluniac cell, where they put on the religious habit. Yet even there these men I saw with pity afterwards suffering adversity above the rest of their fellows in the congregations which they joined.

John, whose censure of the observation of signs does not embrace the observation of purely natural indications, ends with some remarks upon the physicians who study these. They are either men of theory or men of practice. The former must not be betrayed by their studies into opposing the faith. He has too often fallen for his sins into the hands of the latter to care to vex them by speaking against them. He will rather follow Solomon's advice and honour them; but he does not deny himself some hits at their foibles and at the Salernitan maxim, Dum dolet accipe, ‘Take your fee while the patient is ill.’

The third book, directed against the enemies of the commonwealth, is mainly concerned with the censure of flatterers of every sort and kind, whom of all such enemies John reckons to be the most deadly. Noteworthy in this book are his variations on the theme that ‘all the world's a stage,’ where if one actor's part be taken away, another's is gone too, as we see in such a case as Cleopatra's was when Augustus refused to play the part of Julius Caesar. The play of human life is a comedy or a tragedy, according to the point of view; the spectators before whom it is played are God and the angels and those wise and good men in whose souls there is a peace as of Elysium untroubled by the ups and downs of fortune.

In the next book we are told what a true prince is. He is the servant of the law, bearing not only his own burden like a private person, but also the burdens of all the citizens. He is the head of the body politic and the image of the divine majesty on earth. When Attila announced himself as the ‘scourge of God,’ a certain pious bishop raised the chant, ‘Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord,’ and admitted the persecutor to his church. If even persecuting power is so venerable, how much more must be a legally constituted authority? The true prince has no private will; he is the embodiment of equity and may shed blood without guilt, because without enmity or anger. The sword which he bears he receives from the Church and so may be regarded as the minister of the priesthood, appointed to perform functions which it would be below their own dignity to discharge themselves; the inferiority of the prince to the priesthood is illustrated from Saul's deposition by Samuel, Constantine's reverence to the Nicene fathers, Theodosius' submission to St. Ambrose. The prince's duty to God is a duty without qualification; that to his country comes next, then that to his kinsfolk, lastly that to foreigners. But his country must come for him as far as his office goes before his own kinsfolk, and this is typified by the saying of Melchizedek that he was without father or mother. Referring, it would seem, to some apocryphal Acts of Paul, John quotes the Apostle as illustrating to the Athenians the self-sacrifice of Christ by that of Codrus and Lycurgus for their peoples. The law of the kings of Israel as laid down in Deuteronomy is then commented upon sentence by sentence, and each precept illustrated by numerous examples. The reward there promised to good princes of a long reign may perhaps be interpreted of their eternal happiness in the world to come, wherein they will surpass their subjects inasmuch as their opportunities of doing evil have been far greater. But the literal meaning is not excluded; and so with the second part of the promise that their sons shall reign after them, this refers to succession in their earthly thrones as well as in their endless bliss. Hereditary kingship is on many accounts the rule ‘by God's ancient gift,’ but princes must not prefer their children to their people; ‘for even God “spared not His own Son but delivered Him up for us all”’: and descent is ever less important than merit in a ruler. ‘Mine host at Piacenza,’ a place where Englishmen of that day were wont to stay on their way to Rome, ‘a man of good birth having the wisdom of this world in the fear of the Lord, bore witness to the close connexion of political prosperity in Italy with the cultivation of peace, justice, and honesty; whenever these were neglected God brought upon them the pride of the Romans, the fury of the Germans, or some other scourge.’ And so kingly power is transferred from one royal house to another for any of the four kinds of sin enumerated in Ecclesiasticus x. 8 (according to the Vulgate version): injustice which does not punish wrong done, injuriousness which itself wrongs others, scornfulness which from an overweening conceit of self is careless of wronging others, and crafty cunning; the opposites respectively of the four cardinal virtues, justice, temperance or self-restraint, prudence or wisdom, and fortitude.

We are not yet done with our consideration of the royal office. The fifth book pursues the subject now under the guidance of a treatise, which is unknown to us except from the use made of it in the Policraticus and which John believed to be the work of Plutarch—the Institutio Trajani, on which our fifth and sixth books form a commentary. This treatise, though certainly not Plutarch's, would seem to have been a production of a period before the disappearance of the ancient religion, or if, as is perhaps not impossible, the paganism is only assumed along with the authorship and the occasion, at least of a period long anterior to John's own; and even the work of a writer with access to Plutarch's genuine writings, which have certainly been used in its composition. The old comparison of a state to a human body was here carried out into detail with great thoroughness: the priesthood corresponds to the soul, the prince to the head, the senate to the heart, the judges and governors of provinces to the eyes, ears and tongue, the officers and soldiers to the hands, the courtiers to the sides, the quaestors and registrars to the digestive organs, the husbandmen to the feet. Trajan, for whose instruction in his imperial duties the book professed to have been written, was by tradition considered to have been the best of all the heathen Emperors; of him was related the legend immortalized by Dante, that on account of his justice to a poor widow his soul was delivered by the prayers of St. Gregory the Great from the torments of hell. The story is told by John; who, however, like our earliest authority for the tale, John the Deacon, does not go so far as with Dante to translate him to Paradise. The theological difficulty involved in this story was met by St. Thomas Aquinas by the suggestion that Trajan was recalled to life, and so received the grace of baptism. John's discussion in his fifth book of the different orders in the community, priests, princes, judges, provincial governors, is enriched by an abundance of stories from Scripture, mythology, and ancient history; we will only mention the few examples taken from the events of his own time; they all illustrate the incorruptibility which it behoves magistrates to exhibit. Pope Eugenius III would take no gift from any suitor whose cause was pending, and said to a poor priest who offered him a golden mark before his suit had been heard, ‘You have not yet entered the house, and do you wish to corrupt the master of it?’ Bernard of Rennes, a monk of St. Bernard's abbey of Clairvaux and one of Eugenius' cardinals, during his residence at Rome was eminent for his refusal of all presents of money whatever. Martin, a cardinal of Innocent II's creation, returning, ‘contrary to common wont a poor man,’ from serving as the Pope's Legate in Denmark, reluctantly accepted from the Bishop of Florence a horse for his attendant, who was without one, but returned it when he learned that the donor had a suit in the court of Rome. This story John takes from St. Bernard de Consideratione; as also that of the like strictness of Geoffrey, Bishop of Chartres, Papal Legate in Acquitaine, in respect of presents offered him by his provincials. But these, John implies, were exceptions. He speaks with no little severity of the venality of English officials, whether temporal as sheriffs or justices in eyre or spiritual as deans and archdeacons. Probably nothing in our author's works has more often been quoted than the letter written to congratulate a friend who had just been appointed Archdeacon of Huntingdon, in which he banters him on having formerly been in the habit of pitying archdeacons as a band of men who could not hope for salvation. The ‘simoniacal pravity’ of these dignitaries, who could seldom, it seems, resist the temptation to make money out of their office, with its great possibilities in the way of exaction, was a constant theme, not only with John, but with the writers of that time in general.

The sixth book continues the commentary on the Institutio Trajani and deals with the hands of the state, whether unarmed as tax-gatherers and the like or armed as soldiers. The greater part is devoted to this latter class. Much of what John has to say of the choice of soldiers, of what they should know, and how they should live, is taken from the ancient Latin author Vegetius and cannot be used as material for the history of his own day. But in the sixth chapter is an interesting notice of contemporary affairs which suggests that in the South African War we were in some respects true to a very old tradition. In the reign of Henry II the Welshman was found as hard to catch as the Boer in that of Victoria. John tells us how ‘they come out of their caves and woods and invade the level country, assault and storm the fortresses, destroy them or keep them for themselves, under the very eyes of our highborn chieftains,’ while the flower of the English youth were passing their time in amusements. Then he goes on—

They waste our marches while our youth is getting ready; and while our soldiers are arming the enemy is off again and (as the proverb has it) before the dog has done growling the wolf is safe in her lair. There is no one to overtake the enemy as he retreats or to go in pursuit of him because in their heavy equipment they are of no use against a lightarmed foe. Yet he does not take refuge within walls or trenches but in places with which he is indeed better acquainted than are our men, but which are notwithstanding accessible to the latter. He is safe there all the same because our soldiers trust not in their own valour but in their equipment.

Very different success had attended Harold in his Welsh campaign in the days of Edward the Confessor, because he was a really skilful general who understood that the methods of warfare must be adapted to the particular circumstances; and by adopting a mode of arming and fighting similar to those of the Welsh themselves had pursued them into their mountain fortresses, and in two years completely subjugated them. ‘See what can be done with a careful choice of one's general and a proper training of one's troops!’ John attaches great importance to the soldiers' oath of loyalty, which the Christian emperors took over from their heathen predecessors, giving it the Christian form in which we find it stated by Vegetius. An unsworn soldier is like an unordained priest or clerk; he is no true soldier at all, but a brigand. There should be no disaffection on the part of the soldiery toward the unarmed spiritual service, the clergy, in whose defence they should be ready to shed their blood, if need should be. Their loyalty to God must come even before loyalty to their prince; although a soldier may fight loyally for a heathen sovereign, as David did for Achish and many Christians for Diocletian and Julian. How can a prince trust a soldier to be loyal to him who violates his prior obligations to God which are included in the military oath itself? Even though no express oath bind the soldier to the service of the Church he is implicitly bound to it by duty and religion; the custom of the new-made knight laying his sword upon the altar can have no other meaning. The need of sound discipline is earnestly dwelt upon. Its decay in his own time John deplores, and repeats how, while those who should be defending the frontiers spend their time in luxury and vice and in killing the distant Saracens without blood—‘with their mouth,’ as Mr. Kipling might say—the unarmed Welshmen wax insolent and force those who are called Earl Palatine and boast of their royal descent to a humiliating surrender. He has doubtless in his mind the disastrous defeat of Ralph, Earl of Chester, about twenty-three years before the date at which he is writing.

‘There is no one,’ he says, ‘who is willing to join battle with them or to try what they can do in a fair fight under equal conditions.’ The English will challenge them to fight in the level country where their own armour gives them advantage over the unarmed Welsh, ‘but no one of our people pursues them, unarmed though they be, to their forests, from distrust of their own strength.’ Would they had remembered what Florus says of the Cisalpine Gauls: ‘“They have the temper of wild beasts and bodies of more than human stature; but it has been found by experience that in their first onset their courage is greater than man's, but in the next less than woman's; for their Alpine frames reared under a wet sky are somewhat like their native snows, once they are warmed by battle, their strength melts away.”’ So if there were anyone who would attack our Welsh foes, instead of awaiting their assaults, they would doubtless be beaten; but meanwhile a host of unarmed, unwarlike savages devastates an armed province; hungry at home, they satisfy their appetites upon our abundance. For our soldiers by not repelling them as good as give way to them. If neither love of country, nor love of property or even of security will stir them up, at least they should be ashamed of their sluggishness when they see the unarmed Welshmen boasting over them. Would that the wives and mothers of our marches would drive their menfolk back to the field as the Persian women are said to have done theirs when they turned to fly before the Median invaders. It is perhaps curious that John should proceed to stir up his countrymen to military ardour by insisting on the past glories of their race in the days of Brennus, who came (as Geoffrey of Monmouth had lately taught his readers) from ‘Greater Britain, which since the Saxons came into the island is called England,’ invaded Italy, founded Milan and Como, Brescia and Verona, Bergamo, Trent and Vicenza, left a colony at Siena (John is the first extant authority for this legend), where the fairness of the inhabitants still attests their northern blood, took Rome and overran Greece, where only the direct intervention of Apollo saved the Delphic sanctuary from out of his hands. For one might have thought that the Welsh raiders had a nearer interest in these triumphs than the English marchers. He has, however, examples of English valour more recent than this to set before his contemporaries, examples which will shew that it is not native valour that Englishmen lack but military knowledge, practice, and skill—and perhaps a leader. He recalls the victories which Cnut's forces won over the Danes and Norsemen, and tells us that Kent, Cantia nostra, where he and Becket, whom he is addressing, had alike been domiciled in the household of Archbishop Theobald, had won the right still retained to fight in the van of the English army. Master Wace also mentions this privilege in the Roman de Rou. John does not forget to add that his own native county of Wiltshire had the right (along with Devon and Cornwall) to the next place after Kent. The capture of Le Mans under William Rufus, the victories of Henry I over Lewis VI of France and over the faction of his brother, Duke Robert of Normandy, the early triumphs of the reigning sovereign, Henry II, who had held his own against the combined forces of the kings of France and England ‘and a more savage enemy than either, Eustace the husband of the French King's sister,’ had successfully besieged Crowmarsh and Chinon, kept Brittany from breaking out into open revolt, and induced Theobald of Blois to restore him the castles of which he had been robbed in his minority—all this had been accomplished with the help of English valour or of the terror which it inspired in the enemy. Eugenius III said that but for their levity the English were by nature fitter than men of any other nation for any enterprise they might choose to undertake; so it is to be expected that with good training and discipline the English soldiery would be honoured by all as the defenders of their country.

‘The feet of the state’ are the labourers in the mechanical arts and in agriculture. The care of their interests is the great business of the magistrate, upon their protection by their rulers depends the safety and prosperity of the state, which, when they are exposed to harm, goes, as it were, unshod. Plutarch sends Trajan to learn from the bees, as Vergil describes them in his Georgics, the true principles of a commonwealth. Now bees shew the most reverent submission to their king (the queen bee was of course thought until modern times to be a king), and so the utility of his office should reconcile subjects even to put up with some little hardship at their sovereign's hands. And here John gives us a reminiscence of his own. He was staying at Benevento with his intimate friend Hadrian IV, who had been Nicholas Breakspear, the only Englishman that ever was Pope, from whom (as he tells us in the Metalogicon) he obtained for Henry II the grant of Ireland with a golden ring in which a fine emerald was set in token of investiture; all islands by the donation of Constantine belonging of right to the Roman Church. Hadrian asked his friend one day what men said of him and of the Roman Church; and John freely told him how he had heard it complained that the mother of all churches was rather a stepmother than a true mother, that there sat in it scribes and Pharisees binding on others' shoulders grievous burdens they did not touch themselves with one of their fingers, lords over the clergy rather than patterns to the flock, heaping up precious furniture, piling their tables with gold and silver, miserly, proud, unmerciful, venal, rejoicing in the spoils of churches and counting all gain for godliness. The Roman pontiffs themselves, it was said, were unbearably oppressive, they went clad in purple and gold, neglected the churches and altars which their predecessors' devotion had founded to build new palaces for themselves. ‘This, father, is what the people say, since you wish me to repeat their opinion.’ ‘And what do you think?’ said the Pope. John professed himself in a dilemma between the fear of being guilty of flattery and that of being guilty of treason; and took refuge in the authority of Cardinal Guido Dens, who in an assembly of his brethren held at Ferentino asserted openly that the avarice of the Roman Church was the head and root of all evils. On this occasion it would seem that the cardinal had fallen foul of John himself, who was probably much engaged with such English business as came before the court of Rome; we know from what John tells us in his Historia Pontificalis that some such business was in hand on the occasion to which he here refers. Continuing to answer Hadrian, he admits that he has nowhere found more upright clergymen than in the Roman Church—he mentions particularly Cardinal Bernard of Rennes, of whom we have already heard, and Guarino of Bologna, Cardinal Bishop of Palestrina, who even refused his share of the common property belonging to the College of Cardinals. But he cannot deny without lying to the Holy Ghost that in general it is with the Roman hierarchy as with the Pharisees of old; what they command should be done, but not all their works are to be imitated. ‘Who dissents from your teaching is either a heretic or a schismatic; but by God's mercy there are some who do not imitate the works of all of you.’ The Pope himself is called father and lord, but does not act as such. He expects presents and rewards from his children; he does not govern and correct his turbulent Romans, and tries to preserve the city for the Church by bribery. But, asks John, did Silvester (‘il primo ricco padre,’ as Dante calls him) obtain it first by such means? ‘Freely ye have received, freely give. Justice is queen of virtues and blushes to be sold for money. While you oppress others, you are yourself yet more grievously oppressed.’ He is thinking of the vexatious conduct of the Roman nobles, of which we know from a later chapter Hadrian himself at other times bitterly complained to his friend as making him continually regret his early youth in England or the quiet of his later life in the cloister in St. Rufus' Abbey near Avignon. But on the present occasion he only laughed, bade John always tell him as freely what people said of him, and repeated as his own apology the ancient fable of the belly and the members.

With the sixth book the first great division of the Policraticus closes; and John, expressing his resolution to follow the advice of Becket, not to leave the court but to beguile his time there by the study of philosophy, passes from the nugae curialium to the vestigia philosophorum. We will not linger on the summary history of ancient philosophy which follows, though it presents many points of interest. His own preference he does not conceal. It is, as we have already seen, for the modest philosophy of the Academy which will not dogmatize on those things of which a wise man may doubt. He is ever a humanist. He has nothing but contempt for those who are content to exercise their wit and waste their lives on controversies which turn about a few logical words or phrases; such as those who concentrated their attention almost wholly on the obscurities in Porphyry's Introduction to Aristotle's Categories, ‘Porphyriolus,’ as he scornfully calls it. A man is not ‘lettered’ unless he read poets and orators, historians and mathematicians, though all this reading will not bring wisdom without the grace of God. Everything may be read and the good extracted and used; this is intimated by the donation of all sorts of food to our first parents in a state of innocence and also to the sons of Noah after the flood—that is, when restored by grace after punishment for sin. St. Jerome tells us ‘Love the Scriptures’—John takes it in the most general sense of ‘writings’—‘and thou shalt not love the lusts of the flesh.’ And this is the true end of philosophy which, if Plato is right in saying that the philosopher is the lover of God, is the love of God, to which no limit is set, for God is to be loved with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. Very different from the true philosopher are the verbal triflers whose more thorough castigation John reserves for the Metalogicon, where he tells us how, when after twelve years' absence he returned to the Mont St. Geneviève at Paris, where he too had sat with them as a youth at the feet of Abelard, the great ‘Peripatetic of Pallet,’ he found them ‘just where they were before,’ occupied in logical puzzles, and prouder than ever of their occupation, treating as an end in itself that logical art which, useful though it be as a preparation for more advanced studies, can bear the fruit of true philosophy only when impregnated by other sciences. Incidentally John here gives us a glimpse of the current controversies about universals, and speaks of pure nominalism as having expired with its author Roscellinus, though he hints that others who would be ashamed to call themselves his followers are really nominalists, making out universals to be not indeed voces, but what comes to much the same thing, sermones. From a passage in the Metalogicon it would seem that in this criticism he is glancing at no less a thinker than Abelard himself. If, however, we are to pass beyond the mere logic-chopping of these haunters of what was already the Quartier Latin of Paris, we must use the six keys of learning enumerated by the ‘old man of Chartres,’ Bernard, the master of the twelfth-century humanists, of whose method of teaching John has left us in the Metalogicon a lively account, though he did not himself study under him, but under teachers who had formed themselves upon his model. These six keys are humbleness of heart, love of inquiry, a peaceful life, silent meditation, poverty, and exile. This enumeration Hugh of St. Victor had already in the Eruditio Didascalica taken as the text of a description of the scholar's life. John adds a seventh key, suggested by Quintilian, namely, the love of one's teachers. But few care to pursue wisdom for its own sake; rather they seek to compass worldly wealth by means of it. This leads John to dwell at length on the evils of covetousness, especially among ecclesiastics. He attacks the abuses to which it has given occasion in the Church; the traffic in advowsons, the excessive use of the dispensation from canonical obligations, the accumulation of benefices to be served by deputies, who do the work while others get the emoluments. He is particularly severe on the evil fashion whereby men who have obtained preferment by money or services to great men, yet, when it is offered them, pretend to refuse it, professing their unworthiness, the incompatibility of their secular pursuits, the unlawfulness of appointment except by canonical election, and so forth, in order to appear to be reluctantly forced into a place which they have notwithstanding corruptly sought. When the candidate, after his insincere Nolo episcopari, allows himself to be dragged at last to his throne by shouting crowds and chanting choirs, he is thought to be a man of singular modesty and his postponement of acceptance to have been due to genuine unwillingness. We see how easily a cynic like William Rufus might misjudge in St. Anselm a hesitation which, however genuine in his case, was almost as a matter of course simulated by the most unscrupulous place-hunters. Where there is nothing in a man's past or present career to recommend him, his friends, says John, take to prophesying a great future, like a horse-dealer who, by his promises of what he will prove hereafter, diverts his customer's attention from the uneven paces of the beast he is leading gingerly into his dupe's stable. But there is a yet more shameless sort of ecclesiastical place-hunters, who do not even simulate reluctance or dissemble the means they have used to secure their promotion. Such should be treated as Robert, the English Chancellor of King Roger of Sicily, treated the simoniacal candidates for the vacant see of Avellana. There were there an abbot, an archdeacon, and the brother of a certain lay official; the Chancellor agreed independently with each for a sum of money, but when the day of election came, publicly revealed the whole affair and declared that he would henceforth act according to the judgement of the bishops of the province; whereupon a poor monk was canonically elected, but each of the simoniacal candidates was compelled to pay up what he had promised to the very last farthing! An entertaining passage here follows in which the canvasser for ecclesiastical preferment is shewn as turning the edge of every objection by some example of a like defect among the saints. If he is of low birth, so was St. Peter; if under age, so were Jeremiah and St. John the Baptist when first set apart; if a youth, so was Daniel when he defended Susanna; if unlearned, so were the Apostles; if married, so were the bishops whom St. Paul said should be chosen; if he has deserted his wife, so (according to the apocryphal story which made him the bridegroom of Cana) did St. John; if of a slow tongue like Moses, an Aaron can be found to speak for him; if a companion of harlots, so by God's command was Hosea; if foolish, by the foolishness of the world God determined to save them that believe. St. Peter's assault on the High Priest's servant will serve as an excuse for violence, the timidity of Jonah and St. Thomas for cowardice, the tax-gathering of St. Matthew for the ties of public functions. If he is accused of gluttony and winebibbing, so was our Lord; if of insubordination, St. Paul withstood St. Peter to the face. Contention was not unknown among the Apostles, St. Paul was called a babbler, St. Martin was a soldier, Moses a secret and Samuel an open homicide; St. Peter forswore himself; Zacharias, though dumb, discharged the office of a priest; St. Paul was blind when Ananias laid his hands upon him, a deaf man can preach though he cannot hear; Christ Himself was, according to tradition, like a leper, ‘without form or comeliness.’ The objection that he was of despicable condition was brought against St. Martin, St. Cyprian erred in doctrine, St. Gregory the Great was an invalid, St. Brice was proud and vain, the confessor Paphnutius was mutilated, the sons of Zebedee canvassed for the first places in the Kingdom of Heaven, St. Augustine had been a Manichee, Marcellinus the Pope had committed idolatry, St. Ambrose was not yet baptized when chosen bishop, St. Paul had been a persecutor, the Apostles themselves were not canonically elected by the people, and so on.

But even ignorant laymen reprove these unworthy priests, as Balaam's ass reproved his master the prophet. The ancient Christian Emperors made many laws to exclude officers of the state or the court from ecclesiastical charges; but these are not obeyed, and the court candidates for Church preferment rage against assertors of ecclesiastical rights as traitors to their prince. The views to which John gives utterance in these chapters find a commentary in Becket's change of attitude after his elevation to the see of Canterbury, and in our author's steady support of him thereafter against the King and the court party. From simoniacs John passes to hypocrites who conceal their covetousness under a show of extraordinary sanctity. As we should expect from a writer who was not himself a monk, he finds his chief examples of hypocrisy among the religious orders, although these, so far as they live up to their profession, he pronounces to be worthy of all respect: Carthusians, Cistercians, Cluniacs, regular canons, hermits, Templars, Hospitallers and all. But there are reprobates among them, as indeed there was an apostate angel, a reprobate prophet, a traitor apostle. He describes these false pretenders to exceptional holiness, their show of humility and zeal, their greed for tithes, their invasion of other men's rights, their claim to the special protection of the Roman Church. Their injurious privileges were indeed to some extent limited by Pope Hadrian IV (who must have been dead when this passage was added, though the Policraticus was, for the most part, written in his lifetime; and the Metalogicon, its sequel, ends with a lament over his then recent decease), though he would not abolish them all. Yet he allowed the Templars to hold benefices with cure of souls, and so, although shedding blood by profession, ‘in a sense’—by deputy, that is—to minister the blood of Christ, contrary to the canons. The conduct of these unworthy monks is a great hindrance to religion, and a scandal to their profession: while monks who live up to their profession are the truest philosophers of all, these are Epicurean hypocrites (he plays on the similar sounding names) who profess philosophy but follow their own desires, and successors of the Pharisees, with whom our Lord, who ate and drank with publicans and sinners, would have no peace at all. From the censure on monastic hypocrites are excluded two societies: that of the Carthusians, and that of the Order of Grammont, then recently established in the place in the Limousin to which it owed its name. One hypocrite, indeed, to John's knowledge, joined the Carthusian Order for worldly ends; but he afterwards left it again, and no such story has he yet heard of the Order of Grammont, who recognize as their master not Basil or Benedict or Augustine, but only the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. The praise of these two Orders is not intended to suggest that sanctity is not to be found in others. Some of these may rank with the highest of those who follow the stricter rules; just as, although virginity is a higher state than matrimony, martyrdom than confessorship, some married persons are holier than many virgins (we may remark that the first married Archbishop of Canterbury, while the Corpus MS. was in his hands, has approvingly scored this remark with his red pencil), some confessors than some martyrs. Yet the least holy monk leads of necessity a life which would be considered most religious if lived by a secular person, such as the author himself. After hypocrites, envious persons and slanderers of all kinds are described and censured; and the tendency to detract from one's superiors, which we observe in the chapter and the cloister no less than in the court and the school, is illustrated by an anecdote of John's distinguished contemporary, ‘the venerable father Gilbert, Bishop of Hereford’—Gilbert Foliot, that is, of whom in later days, when he had become a principal opponent of Becket, we shall find John in his letters speaking with much less respect. Gilbert said to John that when he was a simple monk he would blame his superiors' lack of zeal; when he was somewhat advanced in the Order he pitied the faults of his equals, but still did not spare them of yet higher rank; when a prior he had sympathy with priors but still carped at abbots; when an abbot (he had been Abbot of Gloucester) he felt kindly towards his fellow-abbots and turned his attention to the faults of bishops; now at last, a bishop himself, he spared his colleagues in the episcopate. John adds that he does not suppose that Gilbert was himself of an envious disposition; he was no doubt only describing in a striking way an innate tendency of human nature.

At the beginning of the eighth and last book John announces his purpose of exploring the camp of the Epicureans, that is of the professed votaries of pleasure, whom he divides into two groups, each represented by a character in Terence's Eunuchus, a play in which the poet ‘has given us a picture of wellnigh the whole of human life’: one by Thraso, the swaggering soldier, the other by Gnatho, his toady and parasite. The vainglory which distinguishes Thraso and his school is, according to St. Gregory, the first offshot of the primal sin, which is pride, and (as Boethius had said) a fault from which even the noblest spirits are seldom free. This last familiar sentiment from the Consolatio Philosophiae, which was all but a sacred book to the Middle Ages, is expressed elsewhere by John in a verse which more closely expresses than the original phrase the famous line of Milton through which we now best know the thought: Haec est praestantes quae deserit ultima mentes, ‘That last infirmity of noble minds.’ We will not follow John through his illustration and censure of various principal vices; but some points of interest in his invective against gluttony may be mentioned. One is his account of a luxurious banquet at which he and John, Treasurer of York (that is, John Whitehands, afterwards Bishop of Poitiers and Archbishop of Lyons), were once present at Canosa in Apulia ‘from the ninth hour of the day to the twelfth hour of the night and that at the equinox.’ There were delicacies from Constantinople, Babylon, Alexandria, Palestine, Tripoli, Barbary, Syria, Phoenicia, ‘as though Sicily, Calabria, Apulia and Campania were not sufficient to furnish forth a dainty banquet.’ The magnificence of this entertainment it needs the eloquence of his companion and namesake to tell, who is skilled in the three languages, Hebrew, Greek and Latin, ‘above any man that I have seen.’ We could have spared many particulars from Petronius and Macrobius for some more details of this feast. But to John himself, naturally enough, reminiscences of his classical reading were more interesting. Yet his quotations of Petronius and Macrobius in this passage have a special interest of their own. We find from the first that he knew that part of Petronius' romance which is called the ‘Supper of Trimalchio.’ This was not included in the copies known to the scholars of the Renaissance, but came to light in the year 1650, when Marino Statileo found it in a manuscript at Trau in Dalmatia. Now, a little more than two centuries earlier, in 1420, Poggio Bracciolini mentions in a letter that he had found and sent to his friend Niccolo Niccoli from England a ‘bit of Petronius,’ and Mr. A. C. Clark has given good reasons for suspecting that the scribe of the Trau MS., which is dated just three years after Poggio's letter, had transcribed the ‘Supper’ from this very find of Poggio's. It is, as Mr. Clark points out, noticeable that an English scholar should have been the only person known to have been acquainted with the ‘Supper’ in the Middle Ages; and it is likely enough that Poggio's fragment was somehow related to the copy used by John. With regard to Macrobius, the eighth book of the Policraticus proves conclusively, in the judgement of its most recent editor, that John had before him a much more complete copy of the Saturnalia than we at present possess; and some of the now missing portions could be to a certain extent reconstructed and some new words added to the lexicons from his extracts. Among the comparatively rare allusions in the Policraticus to the history of his own country we may mention the complaint of William the Conqueror's policy, after his assumption of the English crown and the pacification of his new kingdom, of sending to foreign nations for whatever they could import that was wonderful or grand, so that ‘there flowed into an island which was already wealthy and almost the only one in the world that is self-sufficing, whatever could be found magnificent, not to say luxurious.’ He would have done better, thinks John, to have imitated Augustus Caesar, who, after pacifying Rome, imposed on his subjects laws in restraint of the luxury of the table. Not uninteresting also, as a comment on the life of his time, is John's complaint ‘of the incivility, not to say inhumanity’ of the Cistercian rule forbidding flesh to be placed before guests or anything to be bought on their account; whereas St. Benedict had allowed his priors even to break all but the principal fasts for the sake of hospitality in entertaining strangers.

Towards the end of the last book we find ourselves returning to the subject with which the fourth book opened—that of the difference between the prince and the tyrant. Then the prince was described; now the tyrant has his turn. There is, John tells us, a false State opposed to that which Plutarch describes to Trajan; a state with a tyrant for its head, a schismatical, heretical and sacrilegious priesthood for its soul, a senate of unjust counsellors for its heart, unjust judges and officers for its eyes, tongue and unarmed hand, a robber soldiery for its armed hand, for its feet an impious and rebellious commons. There are tyrant priests, who are hirelings or even robbers instead of shepherds. He applies Ezekiel's denunciation of such to the hierarchy of his own day, and in his denunciation of corruption in high places he only seems to spare the Holy See itself, ‘which may not be judged of any man,’ while in fact his attack is all the more bitter for its irony.

It cannot be believed,’ he cries, ‘that the legates of the Roman Church, which by God's authority is the mother and nurse of faith and morals—that they should presume or condescend to do what by the laws of the heathen is unlawful for Caesar's legates the governors of provinces. How shameless would it be for the disciple of the Crucified, the vicar of Peter, the shepherd of souls, to dare commit crimes which in the times of unbelief the vicar of the Emperor and ruler of men's bodies did not venture to attempt.

The tyrant is the devil's image as the true prince was God's; he may be slain, while the true prince should be reverenced. John's approval of tyrannicide is often quoted. He has already remarked, when dealing with flatterers in the third book, that those only it is lawful to flatter whom it is also lawful to slay. The overthrow of the laws by the tyrant is the supreme treason, and may be avenged by any citizen, who in failing to do so is false to himself and the commonwealth. His language perhaps seemed less startling to him than to some of his later readers; it was a natural development of the republican phraseology which he found in Cicero; and we have no reason to think that he was ever disposed to make a practical application of it, although in his later correspondence he commonly wrote of Frederick Barbarossa, who was supporting an anti-pope at the time, and so was in John's eyes schismatical, as ‘the Teutonic tyrant.’ Yet nowhere does he hint at the lawfulness of assassinating him, even when he rejoices at the Pope's suspension of him from his imperial dignity and release of his subjects from their allegiance. And tyrants may indeed, he expressly tells us, be God's ministers and may, notwithstanding their lawless and tyrannical government, like Saul, claim to be called the Lord's anointed, a title given in Scripture even to the heathen Cyrus, because he executed God's judgement against Babylon. Indeed, though insisting that tyrants usually come to violent ends, and illustrating this from the history of those Roman emperors, from Julius Caesar to Commodus, who deserved the name, he adds, speaking of Severus, who as a persecutor of the Christians is counted a tyrant and whose death is noticed though he was posterior in date to Commodus, lest John should seem to spare the reputed founder of his birthplace, Salisbury, that he died by natural causes at York, ‘since Britain has ever abhorred poisons and has learned to wield the unconquered swords of her sons not against her princes but in their defence.’ Yet one must not suppose that he escaped the penalty of his tyrannical behaviour towards the Christians, which (it is hinted) he paid after his death, when he must have come to share the damnation of the fallen angel whose image he as a tyrant had borne on earth. Passing by the tyrants of ancient times, whose fate John proceeds to describe (promising by the way a separate little book de Exitu Tyrannorum, which either was never written or has not survived), we may, as before, touch upon the examples which he takes from English history. These include Sweyn of Denmark and Eustace, the son of King Stephen, who were both slain in daring to violate the territory of St. Edmund's monastery at Bury in Suffolk; and also the turbulent nobles of the time of anarchy in Stephen's reign with whom Mr. Round deals in his Geoffrey de Mandeville: Geoffrey himself, Earl of Essex; Miles, Earl of Hereford; Ralph, Earl of Chester; Alan, Earl of Richmond; Simon of Senlis, Earl of Northampton; and Gilbert Clare, Earl of Pembroke (son of the founder of Tintern and father of the conqueror of Ireland); William, Earl of Salisbury; and Robert Marmion; all of whom came to tragic ends, ‘of which our present age cannot be ignorant.’ Tyranny has its origin in the love of power; the true prince should rather imitate Gideon, who modestly declined the kingly dignity, than those who are now more often taken as patterns, princes who were not afraid to do despite to God's honour by unlawful interference like Uzziah, who intruded into the priestly office, Antiochus, who set up the abomination in the holy place and burned the books of God's law, or Stephen, who confiscated Archbishop Theobald's and others' copies of the Roman law and silenced Vacarius, the first teacher of it in this country. It is interesting to observe this view of the Roman law as a sacred thing. It is connected with John's deep sense of the spiritual significance of the international unity of Christian civilization under the universal Roman law, and the universal spiritual jurisdiction of St. Peter's successor as a divine ordinance against the separatist tendencies of the different national kingdoms, whose ultimate sanction was to be found in force rather than in reason and revelation. This conviction made him (as we have seen) the strongest supporter of Becket in his struggle with Henry II, as also of Alexander III in his conflict with Frederick Barbarossa. For John the two quarrels were in principle the same; his clear perception of the faults of the papal court no more affected his attitude in the one than his intimate acquaintance with the defects of Becket in the other. On the other hand, while he is ready enough on occasion, even in letters written in the midst of the fight, to bear witness to the great qualities of Henry II, which in the Policraticus, written before it began, he praises so highly, he nowhere admits for a moment that there is anything to be said on the King's side; nowhere does he suggest that he had, in Herbert of Bosham's famous phrase, ‘a zeal for God.’ This is the more remarkable because we know from his account of St. Bernard and Gilbert de la Porrée that he was well able to conceive a dispute in which either party was defending a good cause. The love of power, John goes on, is found even in priests. There have been bloody conflicts even between rival candidates for the Roman pontificate. He had no doubt read of those at the accession of Damasus; but he had more recent examples before him in the struggles between Innocent II and the anti-pope Anaclete II, ‘the son of Pierleone,’ the scandal of which he bitterly deplores. The experience of one who was a Pope's intimate friend had taught him that no condition was more toilsome, nor, so far as this world is concerned, more wretched than a Pope's.

‘If he is the servant of covetousness, that is death to him; if he is not, he will not escape the hands and tongues of the Romans. If he have not the wherewithal to stop their mouths and bind their hands, he must harden his ears, eyes and heart to endure reproaches and sacrilegious crimes.’ It is no empty title of his, as some think, that of servus servorum. Against his will, if not with it, he must perforce serve the servants of God. After all there is none who does not serve. Even the Persons of the Holy Trinity serve in dispensing the divine mercy or justice. Angels and men, whether good or evil, all serve; even the devil who is prince of this world. ‘And so too the Romans serve God and those tyrants whom the Roman Pontiff must needs serve if he is not to be ex-pontiff or ex-Roman,’ that is, either to resign the dignity or go into exile. The author's friend, Hadrian IV, told him that no one is in a more wretched condition than the Pope. If no other harm come to him, he must soon break down through mere overwork. By comparison with the present all the bitterness of his past life seemed sheer delight. The pontifical chair is stuffed with thorns, ‘il gran manto’ (as Nicholas III called it in speaking to Dante in hell) is stuck full of sharp prickles and so heavy as to crush the stoutest shoulders, mitre and crown may well seem splendid, for they are made of fire. ‘The Lord hath even laid me as it were upon the anvil and under the hammer; may He now be pleased with His own right hand to support the burden which He hath laid upon my weakness, for I cannot support it.’ These were Hadrian's own words to John. ‘Does not he,’ asks John, ‘indeed deserve misery who fights for such a prize?’ However rich he be when elected, the next day he will be poor and burdened with infinite debts. What can he expect who is not called by God to this place, but, against the will of Christ in His members, is intruded into it through blind and cruel ambition, not without the shedding of his brother's blood? To do this is rather to be Romulus' successor in fratricide than Peter's in the charge of the Lord's sheepfold. Archbishop Parker has not failed to call attention with his red pencil in the Corpus MS. to these and other passages which reflect upon the papacy.

The Epicureans' way to happiness, that of pleasure, will never lead them thither. For since the Fall, wherein the lust of pleasure lost man an easier way to bliss, the true way lies not through pleasure but through toil. According to the mystical interpretation given in the commentary by Bernard Silvester (a MS. of which lies in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris, but which has never been published in its entirety), the first six books of Vergil's Aeneid set forth to us the stages of man's life in which he seeks to have his own way, at the end whereof he is brought by his own self-will, as it were, down to hell, there to recognize his past errors and learn that he must reach the heavenly Latium by another course. In contrast with the false is described the true way to blessedness, which the author commends to his friend Thomas. In the righteousness and the fear of God he will find, if he believe the words of Scripture, all the good things for which he is ambitious. Nor need he of necessity abandon his splendid way of life (we remember that when Chancellor he was famous for the magnificence of his dress and equipage). He may wear fine clothes and fare sumptuously every day and enjoy precedence over all his fellows; he may in a word humour the times and their bad customs, and, upright himself, use to cheat the world the very seductions with which it cheats others. He is too great a man himself to be taken in its snares.

The illustrious king of the English, Henry the Second, greatest of the kings of Britain, if the issue of his undertakings do but match their beginning, is falling like a thunderbolt on the Garonne, and that, it is said, by your advice and under your guidance; he is besieging Toulouse with good hope of success, not only terrifying the men of Provence as far as the Rhone and the Alps, but, by destroying fortresses and subjugating people, so that he seems a present terror hanging over the world, he has smitten with fear the princes of Spain and of Gaul. Amid such a troublous state of affairs, I pray you, keep innocency, and take heed to the thing that is right—and not only take heed to it yourself, command, preach it to others, let neither love nor hate, fear nor hope turn you aside from the right way.

John ends by commending his book to the kindness of his friend and asking his readers' prayers for himself.

In the new edition of the work of which we have been trying to give the readers of this Review some notion, an effort has been made to examine more thoroughly than had previously been done the sources of John's varied erudition, and among the results of the examination are some (such as those to which reference has actually been made with regard to Petronius and Macrobius) which may be worth the attention of classical scholars. The actual extent of John's reading and knowledge can also be now better ascertained than hitherto: and this should be of service to students of the history of mediaeval culture and of the literary tradition which the Middle Ages handed on to us from antiquity. Some light may also be thrown on the apocryphal literature and on Latin translations of Greek books current in the West in the twelfth century; while it may also be found somewhat easier than heretofore for students of English history to estimate the actual amount of information to be obtained from the scattered references in the Policraticus to events of the writer's own age and of the years immediately preceding.