It was founded in the fourteenth century by the Count Palatine Ruprecht, and had in the first year more than five hundred students, all busily committing to memory, after the old scholastic wise, the rules of grammar versified by Alexander de Villa Dei, and the extracts made by Peter the Spaniard from Michel Psellus's Synopsis of Aristotle's Organon, and the Categories, with Porphyry's Commentaries. Truly, I do not much wonder that Erigena Scotus should have been put to death by his scholars with their penknives. They must have been pushed to the very verge of despair.«

»What a strange picture a university presents to the imagination! The lives of scholars in their cloistered stillness; – literary men of retired habits, and professors who study sixteen hours a day, and never see the world but on a Sunday. Nature has, no doubt for some wise purpose, placed in their hearts this love of literary labor and seclusion. Otherwise, who would feed the undying lamp of thought? But for such men as these, a blast of wind through the chinks and crannies of this old world, or the flapping of a conqueror's banner, would blow it out forever. The light of the soul is easily extinguished. And whenever I reflect upon these things, I become aware of the great importance, in a nation's history, of the individual fame of scholars and literary men. I fear that it is far greater than the world is willing to acknowledge, or, perhaps I should say, than the world has thought of acknowledging. Blot out from England's history the names of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton only, and how much of her glory would you blot out with them! Take from Italy such names as Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Michel Angelo, and Raphael, and how much would be wanting to the completeness of her glory! How would the history of Spain look, if the leaves were torn out on which are written the names of Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderon? What would be the fame of Portugal, without her Camoens; of France, without her Racine, and Rabelais, and Voltaire; or of Germany, without her Martin Luther, her Goethe, and her Schiller? Nay, what were the nations of old, without their philosophers, poets, and historians? Tell me, do not these men, in all ages and in all places, emblazon with bright colors the armorial bearings of their country? Yes, and far more than this; for in all ages and in all places they give humanity assurance of its greatness, and say, ›Call not this time or people wholly barbarous; for thus much, even then and there, could the human mind achieve!‹ But the boisterous world has hardly thought of acknowledging all this. Therein it has shown itself somewhat ungrateful. Else, whence the great reproach, the general scorn, the loud derision, with which, to take a familiar example, the monks of the Middle Ages are regarded? That they slept their lives away is most untrue. For in an age when books were few, – so few, so precious, that they were often chained to their oaken shelves with iron chains, like galley-slaves to their benches, – these men, with their laborious hands, copied upon parchment all the lore and wisdom of the past, and transmitted it to us. Perhaps it is not too much to say, that, but for these monks, not one line of the classics would have reached our day. Surely, then, we can pardon something to those superstitious ages, perhaps even the mysticism of the scholastic philosophy; since, after all, we can find no harm in it, only the mistaking of the possible for the real, and the high aspirings of the human mind after a long-sought and unknown somewhat. I think the name of Martin Luther, the monk of Wittenberg, alone sufficient to redeem all monkhood from the reproach of laziness. If this will not, perhaps the vast folios of Thomas Aquinas will; or the countless manuscripts, still treasured in old libraries, whose yellow and wrinkled pages remind one of the hands that wrote them and the faces that once bent over them.«

»An eloquent homily,« said the Baron, laughing; »a most touching appeal in behalf of suffering humanity! For my part, I am no friend of this entire seclusion from the world. It has a very injurious effect on the mind of a scholar. The Chinese proverb is true: a single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years' mere study of books. I have known some of these literary men who thus shut themselves up from the world. Their minds never come in contact with those of their fellow-men. They read little. They think much. They are mere dreamers. They know not what is new nor what is old. They often strike upon trains of thought, which stand written in good authors some century or so back, and are even current in the mouths of men around them. But they know it not, and imagine they are bringing forward something very original, when they publish their thoughts.«

»It reminds me,« replied Flemming, »of what Dr. Johnson said of Goldsmith, when he proposed to travel abroad in order to bring home improvements: ›He will bring home a wheelbarrow, and call that an improvement.‹ It is unfortunately the same with some of these scholars.«

»And the worst of it is,« said the Baron, »that, in solitude, some fixed idea will often take root in the mind, and grow till it overshadow all one's thoughts. To this must all opinions come; no thought can enter there, which shall not be wedded to the fixed idea. There it remains and grows. It is like the watchman's wife, in the Tower of Waiblingen, who grew to such a size, that she could not get down the narrow staircase, and when her husband died, his successor was forced to marry the fat widow in the Tower.«

»I remember an old English comedy,« said Flemming, laughing, »in which a scholar is described as a creature that can strike fire in the morning at his tinder-box, – put on a pair of lined slippers, – sit ruminating till dinner, and then go to his meat when the bell rings; – one that hath a peculiar gift in a cough, and a license to spit; – or, if you will have him defined by negatives, he is one that cannot make a good leg, – one that cannot eat a mess of broth cleanly.