were ready to go with them in their practical complaints who had no mind to change the doctrines and practices to which they were used. Any general change on that head came later.

By "learning" thus far we have meant the old Latin learning, chiefly in the hands of the clergy. Not only were the services of the Church in Latin, but books in general, not only books of theology, of history, and of such science as there was, but generally all books that were not distinctly either merely polite or merely popular writings. In such a state of things not many besides the clergy could read, and still fewer could write. At the beginning of the twelfth century it was no disgrace for a king not to be able to write or read. The learning of Henry the First, who could certainly do both and who understood at least three languages, was marked as something wonderful. But it must not be thought that, because a man could not write, it therefore followed that he could not read. Writing remained somewhat of a professional business long after reading had become common. The best witness of this is that the word clerk, which strictly means a man in holy orders, came to mean one whose business is writing, and it is now most commonly used in that sense.

The stir in men's minds and the zeal after learning which marked the twelfth century came out strongly in the growth of universi

The two ancient English universities, Oxford and Cambridge, were not founded by any king or any other one man; they pre-eminently came of themselves. We can see how in the first half of the twelfth century a few students of divinity came together to hear a famous lecturer, and somewhat later the same thing happened with students in law. The start once made, both masters and scholars flocked together, and the universities grew up with their faculties, their subjects of teaching, divinity, law, medicine, and arts. Then in the latter part of the thirteenth century men began to found colleges; that is, they got together a certain number of students in the university, and gave them a house to live in and land or tithe to maintain them. Such colleges are a special feature of the English universities; there is nothing exactly like them in any other land. So the universities grew and prospered, favored by bishops and kings and popes, and receiving many privileges from them, but not

the creation of any of them, but something which came of itself.

By law, in the sense of the universities, was meant the civil and canon law of Rome, that is the law of the Emperors and the law of the Popes. As these were in force in a large part of Europe, they were naturally a chief subject of study everywhere, though less so in England than elsewhere. For with us there arose the profession of the common law, the law of England, as distinguished from either of the laws of Rome. Before the Norman Conquest and for some time after, a knowledge of the law is spoken of as the attribute of age and experience, not as the possession of a particular class of men. The English law was more strictly national, and borrowed less from Rome, imperial or papal, than the law of any other European land. A class of common lawyers therefore arose, with a learning of their own, a learning which spoke Latin, French, and English in turn. It marks a great national advance when in the fifteenth century the famous Judge Sir John Fortescue, who certainly knew Latin and French well, wrote books on the law and constitution of England in the English tongue.

Besides language and learning and other matters which had much to do with them, there were other points which were affected by the greater amount of dealing with strangers which the Norman Conquest brought with it. The Conquest and its results helped gradually to bring in a whole train of new ideas. Or rather perhaps they did not bring in altogether new ideas, but rather gave a new and enlarged strength to some ideas that were already at work. It is well, if we can, to avoid the words feudal and chivalrous, because they are so easily misunderstood; yet it is hard to do without them, and they do express a certain meaning. The word feudal really means nothing more than a certain tenure of land, a tenure certainly not unknown before the Norman Conquest, but which grew largely after it. It really means little more than the burthens which this tenure laid on those who held land according to it, burthens which were put into shape in the time of William Rufus, and which were not abolished till the time of Charles the Second. It was tenure by military service, due from the holder of the land to the lord. It was therefore held that, whenever there was no one to discharge the service due from the land, the lord might take the

built much in one fashion, keeping on the old Roman style as well as might be. In the eleventh century different countries struck out varieties of their own, all keeping the round arch and some general Roman traditions, and therefore, like the earlier buildings, called Romanesque. One of these forms of Romanesque grew up in northern Gaul, and was brought into England by the Normans, where it gradually displaced the older form of Romanesque common to all Western Europe. This is the Norman style, the style of the great buildings of the twelfth century. Toward the end of that century the style became lighter and richer; then the pointed arch came into use instead of the round; and gradually a system of moulding and ornament was devised which better suited the pointed arch. This is commonly called Gothic architecture, a foolish name in itself, as it had nothing whatever to do with the Goths, but which may be endured, if we use it as distinguished from Romanesque. Of this general style each land, England, France, Germany, had its own varieties; in each country the details of the style were constantly changing, the windows specially getting larger and larger. This lasted till some way in the sixteenth century, when architecture, like other things, began to change before the new influences of which we shall have presently to speak.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries nearly all the buildings of any account are either ecclesiastical or military, that is either churches and their appendages (as the buildings of a monastery or college), or else castles. But there are houses remaining, even from the twelfth century, and they get more and more common as we go on. Such houses are found both in the towns and in the open country, manor-houses, parsonages, houses of every kind, with no military character at all about them. Men could venture to live in the open country in England sooner than in France, because the law gave better protection in England, and it was not so needful to live within the walls either of a castle or of a fortified town. But for that very reason there are not such fine town-houses in England as there are in France, Germany, and above all Italy. And for nearly the same reason there are not such grand civic buildings in England as in Flanders, Germany, and Italy. An ancient English guildhall differs hardly at all from the hall of a college

or a large house. As there was less fighting in the land, the building of castles as dwellings went out of use. It is curious to mark the steps by which the castle gradually changes into the great house; the arrangements for defence, which were once allimportant, first become mere survivals, and then are left out altogether. By the beginning of the sixteenth century houses, great and small, were built in which men of the nineteenth century can live, which we can hardly say of houses of earlier times.

Besides these arts which grew, many particular inventions came in during these ages, and there were many men who distinguished themselves by knowledge of various kinds beyond their age. To take one instance out of many, no study seems more modern than that of the science of language; yet remarkable approaches toward were made in the twelfth and thirteenth century by Gerald Barry (commonly known as Giraldus Cambrensis), who lived from about 1146 to about 1220, and by the famous Franciscan friar, Roger Bacon, who lived from about 1214 to about 1294. Roger Bacon was a man of remarkable learning and thought in many ways. And in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries England became affected by the two inventions which have changed the face of the world. It is said that Edward the Third used cannon in his wars ; but gunpowder certainly played no great part in warfare or in any thing else, till it gradually came into use in the fifteenth century. And in this last century printing was invented and came into England. William Caxton, who lived from about 1422 to 1491, printed the first English book about 1474, and the first book in England in 1477. The English tongue, now thoroughly formed in its newer shape, stood ready for the new art.

Looking through the centuries of which we have been speaking, we may say that the twelfth century was a learned age, and, in its latter half at least, a polite age, but that its learning and politeness could not affect the nation at large on account of difference of language. The thirteenth century was also an intellectual age; but its political interest is so absorbing that one hardly thinks of any other side of it. In that age the abiding freedom of England grew into its full shape, which after times have been able only to improve in detail. And the struggle for free

spoken in the land. The thirteenth century too was the age of the religious revival of the friars and the time when the struggle with the Popes became a national struggle. Kings, especially King Henry the Second, had begun it already; but it hardly became a popular movement till the time of Henry the Third. The fourteenth century is certainly, in matter of learning, below those that went before it, and the political advance of this time is less striking than that of the thirteenth. Still it is very great; but it was made chiefly by particular enactments and the establishment of particular precedents, not by great visible changes, like the establishment of Parliament in the thirteenth. In the thirteenth century men had largely speculated on political matters; in the fourteenth they began to speculate also on social and on religious matters. The revolt of the villains in the time of Richard the Second, which, though crushed at the moment, led to the gradual dying out of villainage, was not merely a revolt against practical grievances. Men were thinking and asking questions, why one man should not be as free as another. Such questions had been asked before, but never with the same force. And the social

largely mixed up together. That age was one of very busy thought on great practical matters. The age in which the native tongue won its great conquest was likely to be so.

The fifteenth century seems in many things to be inferior to any of the others. It certainly was in the matter of learning of the older kind. And in politics it was a sad falling-back from the thirteenth and fourteenth. By the beginning of the fifteenth century the main lines of the English constitution were fixed; in the course of the century came that great growth of the royal power which lasted for two hundred years, at the end of which, things had to be brought back to what they had been at the beginning of the fifteenth century. On the other hand, this age was as it were touched, as in a kind of twilight, by the special light which was to come in the next century. And, as immediately following the time when the English language won its great victory, it was the time that fixed the character of English prose, and gave it a new life by the invention of printing. The fifteenth century was to language what the thirteenth was to politics. Later ages have been only able to improve, if they always have improved, in detail.

PART III.

SENTENCE-STRUCTURE

I

AND FIGURATIVE

LANGUAGE.

N my last paper we were considering the structure of sentences, and I submitted that the leading principles of sentencestructure apply also to paragraphs and to the whole composition. In illustration of this I proposed to examine three of the special types of sentence distinguished by rhetoricians, the Balanced Sentence, the Period, and

Climax. I had dealt with what is called Balance, and tried to make clear its principle. Let us proceed next to the Period.

A Period is commonly defined as a sentence in which the meaning remains suspended till the whole is finished. A sentence is not a period, according to this definition, if you can stop anywhere before the last

word and yet have a complete meaning, as in the sentence I am now writing. You cannot, of course, have the meaning intended by the writer till you reach his last word, but if the mind can rest upon a subject and predicate before the end is reached, the sentence is not technically a period. The structure is said to be "loose," as opposed to periodic, if any thing is added after the grammatical essentials of a sentence. The following from De Quincey is an example o a perfect period :

Raised almost to divine honors, never mentioned but with affected raptures, the classics of Greece and Rome are seldom read.

To explain precisely how periods are constructed, I must assume a knowledge of the ordinary terms of grammatical analysis. Every sentence being grammatically divisi