The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (13 inch ebook reader .txt) 📕

a third legend on this subject which informs us that, soon after Bede’s death, one of his disciples was appointed to compose an epitaph in Latin Leonines, and carve it on his monument, and he began thus,

‘Hac sunt in fossa Bedae ossa,’

intending to introduce the word sancti or presbyteri; but as neither of these words would suit the metre, whilst he was puzzling himself to find one more convenient, he fell asleep. On awaking he prepared to resume his work, when to his great astonishment he found that the line had already been completed on the stone (by an angel, as he supposed), and that it stood thus:⁠—

‘Hac sunt in fossa Bedae Venerabilis ossa.’ ”

Richard of St. Victor was a monk in the monastery of that name near Paris, “and wrote a book on the Trinity,” says the Ottimo, “and many other beautiful and sublime works”; praise which seems justified by Dante’s words, if not suggested by them. Milman, History of Latin Christianity, VIII 241, says of him and his brother Hugo:⁠—

“Richard de St. Victor was at once more logical and more devout, raising higher at once the unassisted power of man, yet with even more supernatural interference⁠—less ecclesiastical, more religious. Thus the silent, solemn cloister was, as it were, constantly balancing the noisy and pugnacious school. The system of the St. Victors is the contemplative philosophy of deep-thinking minds in their profound seclusion, not of intellectual gladiators: it is that of men following out the train of their own thoughts, not perpetually crossed by the objections of subtle rival disputants. Its end is not victory, but the inward satisfaction of the soul. It is not so much conscious of ecclesiastical restraint, it is rather self-restrained by its inborn reverence; it has no doubt, therefore no fear; it is bold from the inward consciousness of its orthodoxy.”

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As to many other life-weary men, like those mentioned in Purgatorio XVI 122:⁠—

“And late they deem it
That God restore them to the better life.”

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“This is Master Sigier,” says the Ottimo, “who wrote and lectured on Logic in Paris.” Very little more is known of him than this, and that he was supposed to hold some odious, if not heretical opinions. Even his name has perished out of literary history, and survives only in the verse of Dante and the notes of his commentators. ↩

The Rue du Fouarre, or Street of Straw, originally called Rue de l’École, is famous among the old streets of Paris, as having been the cradle of the University. It was in early times a hay and straw market, and hence derives its name. In the old poem of “Les Rues de Paris,” Barbazan, II 247, are these lines:⁠—

“Enprès est rue de l’École,
Là demeure Dame Nicole;
En celle rue, ce me samble,
Vent-on et fain et fuerre ensamble.”

Others derive the name from the fact, that the students covered the benches of their lecture-rooms with straw, or used it instead of benches; which they would not have done if a straw-market had not been near at hand.

Dante, moved perhaps by some pleasant memory of the past, pays the old scholastic street the tribute of a verse. The elegant Petrarca mentions it frequently in his Latin writings, and always with a sneer. He remembers only “the disputatious city of Paris, and the noisy Street of Straw”; or “the plaudits of the Petit Pont and the Rue du Fouarre, the most famous places on earth.”

Rabelais speaks of it as the place where Pantagruel first held disputes with the learned doctors, “having posted up his nine thousand seven hundred and sixty-four theses in all the carrefours of the city”; and Ruskin, Modern Painters, III 85, justifies the mention of it in Paradise as follows:⁠—

“A common idealist would have been rather alarmed at the thought of introducing the name of a street in Paris⁠—Straw Street (Rue du Fouarre)⁠—into the midst of a description of the highest heavens.⁠ ⁠… What did it matter to Dante, up in heaven there, whether the mob below thought him vulgar or not! Sigier had read in Straw Street; that was the fact, and he had to say so, and there an end.

“There is, indeed, perhaps, no greater sign of innate and real vulgarity of mind or defective education, than the want of power to understand the universality of the ideal truth; the absence of sympathy with the colossal grasp of those intellects, which have in them so much of divine, that nothing is small to them, and nothing large; but with equal and unoffended vision they take in the sum of the world, Straw Street and the seventh heavens, in the same instant. A certain portion of this divine spirit is visible even in the lower examples of all the true men; it is, indeed, perhaps the clearest test of their belonging to the true and great group, that they are continually touching what to the multitude appear vulgarities. The higher a man stands, the more the word ‘vulgar’ becomes unintelligible to him.”

The following sketch from the note book of a recent traveller shows the Street of Straw in its present condition:⁠—

“I went yesterday in search of the Rue du Fouarre. I had been hearing William Guizot’s lecture on Montaigne, and from the Collége de France went down the Rue St. Jacques, passing at the back of the old church of St. Severin, whose gargoyles still stretch out their long necks over the street. Turning into the Rue Galande, a few steps brought me to the Fouarre. It is a short and narrow street, with a scanty footway on one side, on the other only a gutter. The opening at the farther end is filled by a picturesque vista of the transept gable and great rose-window of Notre Dame, over the river, with the slender central spire. Some of the houses