[242] Odo of Cluny, Collationes, lib. i. cap. i. (Migne 133, col. 519 and 520).
“Therefore God, Creator and Judge of mankind, although He have justly driven our race from that felicity of Paradise, yet mindful of His goodness, lest man all guilt should incur what he deserves, softens the sorrows of this pilgrimage with many benefits.... Indeed the purpose of that same Scripture is to press us from the depravities of this life. For to that end with its dreadful utterances, as with so many goads, it pricks our heart, that man struck by fear may shudder, and may recall to memory the divine judgments which he is wont so easily to forget, cut off by lust of the flesh and the solicitudes of earth.”
[243] Ruotgerus, Vita Brunonis, cap. 4 and 6; Pertz, Mon. Germ. Script. iv. p. 254, and Migne 134, col. 944 and 946. A translation of this passage is given ante, Vol. I., p. 310. See ibid., p. 314, for the scholarship and writings of Hermannus Contractus, an eleventh-century German. Ruotger’s clumsy Latin is outdone by the linguistic involutions of the Life of Wenceslaus, the martyr duke of Bohemia, written toward the close of the tenth century by Gumpoldus, Bishop of Mantua, who seems to have cultivated classical rhetoric most disastrously (Pertz, Mon. Germ. Script. iv. p. 211, and in Migne 135, col. 923 sqq.).
[244] From Thurot, Notices et extraits, etc., 22 (2), p. 87, and p. 341 sqq., one may see that the principles of construction stated by mediaeval grammarians followed the usage of mediaeval writers in adopting a simpler or more natural order than that of classical prose. An extract, for example, from an eleventh-century MSS. indicates the simple order which this grammarian author approved: e.g. “Johannes hodie venit de civitate; Petrus, quem Arnulfus genuit et nutrivit, intellexit multa” (Thurot, p. 87).
[245] Ante, Chapter XXX., II.
[246] So likewise in regard to verse, the perfected two-syllable rhyme came first in Italy, and more slowly in the North, although the North was to produce better Latin poetry.
[247] Ante, Chapters XI., IV., and XVI.
[248] Opusc. xiv., De ordine erimitarum (Migne 145, col. 329).
“We may see upon a tree a leaf ready to succumb beneath the wintry frosts, and, with the sap of autumnal clemency consumed, even now about to fall, so that it barely cleaves to the twig it hangs from, but displays most evident signs of (its) light ruin. The blasts are quivering, wild winds strike it from all sides, the mid-winter horror of heavy air congeals with cold; and that you may marvel the more, the ground is strewn with the rest of the leaves everywhere flowing down, and, with its locks laid low, the tree is stripped of its grace; yet that alone, none other remaining, endures, and, as the survivor of co-heirs, succeeds to the rights of the brotherhood’s possession. What then is left to be understood from consideration of this thing, save that a leaf of a tree cannot fall unless it receive beforehand the divine command?”
This description is rhetorically elaborated; but Damiani commonly wrote more directly, as in this sentence from a letter to a nobleman, in which Damiani urges him not to fail in his duty to his mother through affection for his wife: “Sed forte dices: mater mea me frequenter exasperat, duris verbis meum et uxoris meae corda perturbat; non possumus tot injuriarum probra perferre, non valemus austeritatis ejus et severae correptionis molestias tolerare” (Ep. vii. 3; Migne 144, col. 466). This needs no translation.