Horace, Lucan, and Boëthius. The first part, De honesto, reviews Prudentia, Justitia, Fortitude, and under these a number of particular virtues in correspondence with which the extracts are arranged. The De utili considers the adventitious goods of circumstance and fortune.
The extracts forming the substance of this work were intelligently selected and smoothly joined; and the treatise was much used by those who studied the antique philosophy of life. It was drawn upon, for instance, by that truculent and well-born Welshman, Giraldus Cambrensis, in his De instructione principum, which the author wrote partly to show how evilly Henry Plantagenet performed the functions of a king. This irrepressible claimant of St. David's See had been long a prickly thorn for Henry's side.[1] But he was a scholar, and quotes from the whole range of the Latin Classics.
III
When a man is not a mere transcriber, but puts something of himself into the product of his pen, his work will reflect his personality, and may disclose the various factors of his spiritual constitution. To discover from the writings of mediaeval scholars the effect of their classical studies upon their characters is of greater interest than to trace from their citations the authors read by them. Such a compilation as the Summa moralium which has just been noticed, while plainly disclosing the latter information, tells nothing of the personality of him who strung the extracts together. Yet he had read writings which could hardly have failed to influence him. Cicero and Seneca do not leave their reader unchanged, especially if he be seeking ethical instruction. And there was a work known to this particular compiler which moved men in the Middle Ages. Deep must have been the effect of that book so widely read and pondered on and loved, the De consolatione of Boëthius with its intimate consolings, its ways of reasoning and looking upon life, its setting of the intellectual above the physical, its insistence
- ↑ The works of Giraldus Cambrensis are published in Master of Rolls Series, 21, in eight volumes. The last contains the De instructione principum. Giraldus lived from about 1147 to 1220.
