[240] S. Antoninus, Vita, § 6.
[241] Preface to his Meditations from St. Thomas.
[242] Eccles. xxiv. 43, 44, 47 (Lessons for the Common of Doctors).
[243] Leland.
[244] Nevertheless, oddly enough, the susceptibility to natural beauty and the power of describing it with the pen is often claimed as one of the good things restored to us by the Renaissance. The author of Cosmos, in that beautiful Introduction to his work in which he traces the history of the love of nature, observes that, “when the sudden intercourse with Greece caused a general revival of classical literature, we find as the first example among prose writers a charming description of nature from the pen of Cardinal Bembo.” Had the writer opened any of the monastic Chronicles in which his own country is so rich, he would have found that the monks, whom Bembo would have regarded as barbarians, had been before him as landscape painters in words, by at least six centuries.
[245] Fescennia, a town of Etruria, was noted in the days of Horace for the rude extempore verses, full of coarse raillery, composed by its inhabitants, and commonly known as Fescennina carmina (Hor. Ep. ii. 1. 145). The Theonine tooth is likewise an expression derived from Horace (Ep. i. 18. 82); and seems to have been a proverbial expression derived from Theon, the name of a certain Roman freedman, well known for his malignant wit. (See Notes on Horace by Rev. A. J. Maclean.)
[246] If the suggestion to restore the teaching of the Latin prayers and the plain song of the Church in our parochial schools be deemed preposterous on the ground of its difficulty, we would simply beg objectors to try the experiment before passing judgment. A very short experience will prove that with ordinary perseverance nothing is easier than to make a class of boys recite fluently and chant correctly from note the Psalms of Vespers or Compline, or the Credo, Gloria, and other portions of the Mass; and we may add, that nothing seems more acceptable to the scholars themselves. What was possible in an age when the whole instruction must have been given orally, cannot have any insuperable difficulties about it in days when every child may be provided with a printed book. Possibly in a congregation thus trained there might be fewer complaints than there now are on the score of children behaving badly in church: for when children understand and take part in what is going on around them, they do not behave amiss. More valid objections can be conceived as arising from the difficulty of sparing the time when so many other subjects have to be taught. But what is more essential to teach Catholics than their Catholic prayers? and what branch of secular learning will prove a substitute for sound, genuine, and intelligent Catholic Faith?
[247] Many different versions exist of this hymn, which may be thus rendered into modern English: “Saint Mary, pure Virgin Mother of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, take, shield, help mine Godric, take, bring him safe with thee into the kingdom of God., Saint Mary, bower of Christ, purity of virgins, flower of mothers, take away my sins, reign in my mind, and bring me to dwell with the only God.”
[248] The custom was very general in poor parishes. Thus Reginald of Durham tells us of a certain scholar, Haldene by name, who was wont to attend the school which, “according to the known and accustomed usage,” was held in the Church of St. Cuthbert, at Northam. One day Haldene, who did not know his lessons and was afraid of the rod, conceived the bright idea of getting hold of the key and throwing it into the Tweed, so that when the hour of Vespers came no key was to be found. The example, in far later times, of “Wonderful Walker,” keeping school in his village church, was therefore but a surviving relic of the primitive manners.
[249] Antiquities of the Monastical Church of Durham, pp. 54, 77.