Associations of his youth. Burgundy in which he was born and bred rather than to the Italy which in after days he visited as a stranger.[1] There, in the last home of old Gaulish freedom, in an Augusta named after the first Augustus—an Augusta which we doubt whether to call Prætorian from the conquerors or Salassian from the conquered—in the long valley fenced in by the giant Alps on either side—at the foot of the pass where local belief holds that Hannibal had crossed of old and where Buonaparte was to cross in days to come—there where the square walls of the Roman town rise almost untouched above the rushing Dora—where the street still bearing the name of Anselm leads from the Roman gate to the Roman arch of triumph, where the towers of Saint Gratus and Saint Urse, fellows of kindred towers at Verona and at Lincoln, at Schaffhausen and at Cambridge, rose fresh in all their squareness and sternness when Anselm lay as a babe beneath their shadow—there, among the sublimest works of nature and among some of the most striking works of man, was born the teacher of Normandy, the shepherd of England, the man who dived deeper than any man before him into the most awful mysteries of the faith, but whom we have rather to deal with as one who ranks by adoption among the truest worthies of England, the man
- ↑ Pope Urban (Hist. Nov. 45) counsels Anselm to avoid the unhealthy season at Rome, "quia urbis istius aër multis et maxime peregrinæ regionis hominibus nimis est insalubris." Later in the story (Hist. Nov. 72), Ivo of Chartres gives him a like piece of advice about Italy generally; "Accepit ab Ivone et a multis non spernendi consilii viris, satius fore cœptum iter in aliud tempus differendum, quam Italicis ardoribus ea se tempestate cum suis tradere cruciandum. Nimis etenim fervor æstatis ita ubique, sed maxime, ut ferebatur, in Italia, tunc temporis quæque torrebat, ut incolis vix tolerabilis, peregrinis vero gravis et importabilis." The difference of air between Aosta and Rome or Italy generally does not depend upon the boundaries of kingdoms; but here Anselm is distinctly reckoned as a "peregrinus homo" in Italy no less than Eadmer or Ivo or Pope Urban himself.
