оссиру with my own and whatever else might have been said upon the subject, spatiis exclusus iniquis Prætereo. Nor do I unwillingly conclude with a word from him, the chiefest in Latin art, for whom our admiration need not in the least be diminished by our ability to admire Latin verse, composed on very different principles from his; and, if possessing, yet needing also, large compensations, for all which it has not, but which he with his illustrious fellows has; and which must leave, in so many aspects, the great masterpieces of Greece and Rome for ever without competitor or peer. POEMS. OF ADAM OF ST VICTOR. the life of Adam of St Victor, the most fertile, and, as I am inclined to believe, the greatest of the Latin hymnologists of the middle ages, very little is known. He was probably a native of Brittany, although the terms breton, brito, which in the early writers indicate his country, leave in some doubt whether England might not have had the honour of giving him birth. The authors of the Histoire Littéraire de la France, vol. xv. p. 40-45, account this not altogether unlikely ; and it is certain that this illustrious foundation drew together its scholars from all parts of Europe; thus, of its other two chiefest ornaments, Hugh was a Saxon, and Richard a Scot. Yet the fact that France was the great seat of Latin poetry in the twelfth century, and that all the chief composers in this kind, as Hildebert, the two Bernards, Abelard, Marbod, Peter the Venerable, were Frenchmen, leaves it more likely that he, the chiefest of all, was such as well. At all events he made his studies at Paris, where he entered the religious foundation of St Victor, then in the suburbs, but at a later day included within the walls, of Paris, in which he continued to his death. The year of his death is unknown; the Gallia Christiana places it somewhere between 1172 and 1192. Gautier, of whose edition of Adam's hymns I shall have presently to speak, thinks the latter year to be itself the most probable date (vol. i. p. lxxxviii). His epitaph, graven on a plate of copper in the cloister of St Victor, near the door of the choir, remained till the general destruction of the first Revolution. The ten first verses of it, as Gautier has shown, are his own, and constituted an independent poem, which, with the title De Miseria Hominis, is still to be found among his works. The four last were added by a later hand, so to fit them for an epitaph on their author. His own lines possess a grand moral flow, and are very well worthy to be quoted. Hæres peccati, naturâ filius iræ, Unde superbit homo, cujus conceptio culpa, Dum magis alludit præsentis gloria vitæ, Præterit, immo fugit; non fugit, immo perit. Hic ego qui jaceo miser et miserabilis Adam, Parce pater, fratres parcite, parce Deus. We may certainly conclude that Adam of St Victor shared to the full in the theological culture of the school to which he belonged. This, indeed, is evident from his hymns, which, like the poetry of Dante, have often times as great a theological, as poetical or even devotional interest, the first indeed sometimes predominating to the injury of the last. The aim of that illustrious school of theology, especially in its two foremost representatives, Hugh, and his scholar Richard, of St Victor, the first called in his own day Lingua Augustini, Alter Augustinus, and both of them cotemporaries of Adam, though Hugh belonged to an elder generation, was to unite and harmoniously to reconcile the scholastic and mystic tendencies, the light and the warmth, which had appeared more in opposition in Abelard and Bernard and to this its noble purpose and aim it long remained true: nor would it be easy to exaggerate the influence for good which went forth from this institution during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries upon the whole Church. (See Liebner, Hugo von St Victor, p. 9-16.) It long remained faithful to the cultivation of sacred song: for, in later times, Santeuil, a poet, it is true, of a very different rank indeed from him with whom we now have to do, was a Victorine as well. Very different estimates have been formed of the merits of Adam of St Victor's hymns. His most zealous admirers will hardly deny that he pushes too far, and plays overmuch with, his skill in the typical application of the Old Testament.* So too they must own that sometimes he is unable to fuse with a perfect success his manifold learned allusion into the passion of * Calderon is often, consciously or unconsciously, an imitator of Adam of St Victor's manner-knitting together, as he does, a succession of allusions to Old Testament types, and weaving them his poetry. How full of this learned allusion they are, I have had evidence while preparing this volume, in the amount of explanatory notes which they required,-so far larger than almost any other equal quantity of verse which it contains. Nor less must it be allowed that he is sometimes guilty of concetti, of plays upon words, not altogether worthy of the solemnity of his theme. Thus of one martyr he says: Sub securi stat securus; of another, St Lawrence namely: Dum torretur, non terretur; with more or less success into the woof of a single poem. This hymn, drawn from an Auto of his, on the Holy Eucharist, will illustrate what I mean: Honey in the lion's mouth, Emblem mystical, divine, How the sweet and strong combine; By our Joseph laid in store, Dew on Gideon's snowy fleece; Well from bitter changed to sweet; Shew-bread laid in order meet, Bread whose cost doth ne'er increase Though no rain in April fall; Horeb's manna, freely given, Showered in white dew from heaven, Marvellous, angelical; Weightiest bunch of Canaan's vine; Cake to strengthen and sustain Thou the antidote shalt be |