than ever by the sting of the fire that is not quenched.’  By 400 A.D.  Augustine cries triumphantly that the theatres are falling—­the very walls of them tumbling—­throughout the Empire. ’Per omnes paene civitates cadunt theatra ... cadunt et fora vel moenia in quibus demonia colebantur’; the very walls within which these devilments were practised.  But the fury is unabated and goes on stamping down the embers.  In the eighth century our own Alcuin (as the school of Freeman would affectionately call him) is no less fierce.  All plays are anathema to him, and he even disapproves of dancing bears—­though not, it would appear, of bad puns:  ’nec tibi sit ursorum saltantium cura, sed clericorum psallentium.’[2]

The banning of all literature you will find harder to understand; nay impossible, I believe, unless you accept the explanation I gave you.  Yet there it is, an historical fact.  ’What hath it profited posterity—­quid posteritas emolumenti tulit,’ wrote Sulpicius Severus, about 400 A.D., ‘to read of Hector’s fighting or Socrates’ philosophising?’ Pope Gregory the Great—­St Gregory, who sent us the Roman missionaries—­made no bones about it at all. ‘Quoniam non cognovi literaturam,’ he quoted approvingly from the 70th Psalm, ‘introibo in potentias Domini’:  ’Because I know nothing of literature I shall enter into the strength of the Lord.’  ’The praises of Christ cannot be uttered in the same tongue as those of Jove,’ writes this same Gregory to Desiderius, Archbishop of Vienne, who had been rash enough to introduce some of his young men to the ancient authors, with no worse purpose than to teach them a little grammar.  Yet no one was prouder than this Pope of the historical Rome which he had inherited.  Alcuin, again, forbade the reading of Virgil in the monastery over which he presided:  it would sully his disciples’ imagination.  ‘How is this, Virgilian!’ he cried out upon one taken in the damnable act,—­’that without my knowledge and against my order thou hast taken to studying Virgil?’ To put a stop to this unhallowed indulgence the clergy solemnly taught that Virgil was a wizard.

To us, long used as we are to the innocent gaieties of the Classical Tripos, these measures to discourage the study of Virgil may appear drastic, as the mental attitude of Gregory and Alcuin towards the Latin hexameter (so closely resembling that of Byron towards the waltz) not far removed from foolishness.  But there you have in its quiddity the mediaeval mind:  and the point I now put to you is, that out of this soil our Universities grew.