[12] When Anselm’s guilt was ultimately proved, people were somewhat troubled as to the ill-success of their Providential detective service, until they heard that the goldsmith, in accusing the canon, had broken faith with him.
[13] Luckily the citizen-parents were wiser than their Solomon for once. They proposed that the process should commence with the seven treasurers. In spite of preliminary experiments in private the canon was convicted. But the reader must go to the pious Geoffroy’s narrative (Migne, vol. 156, col. 1011) to read how the burglar was tortured, how he obtained release for a time by trickery, and how, being unable to sleep at night for a miraculous dove, he finally confessed and restored.
[14] The Count of Anjou had just invented them to hide the enormity of his bunions. Flattering courtiers found them excellent. The English king’s jester had exaggerated the turned-up points, and the nobles were driving the practice to death, as is the aristocratic wont.
[15] The condition of monasteries will be found treated more fully on [p. 125]; that of nunneries on [p. 209].
[16] Not a single one of Abélard’s songs has come down to us. A few songs are to be found which bear his name, but they are not genuine. It is an unfortunate loss, since the religious hymns of his later years convey no better impression of his true and unspoiled poetic faculty than the moonlight does of the rays of the sun.
[17] This detail is found in Abélard’s second letter to Heloise. It is characteristic of Mr. Cotter Morison’s ‘sketch’ of Abélard that he should have missed it, and thought fit to deny it. Deutsch reads him a severe lesson on the duty of accuracy in his Peter Abälard.
[18] A prior is the second in command in an abbey, or the head of a priory; a priory was a small branch monastery, in those days, though it may now, as with the Dominicans, be a chief house.
[19] This is erroneous; Calixtus II. filled the papal chair at the time.
[20] The statue was preserved in a neighbouring church until the eighteenth century. It was destroyed at the Revolution.
[21] Mr. Leslie Stephen has kindly drawn my attention to Elwin’s theory (Pope’s Works) that he followed the translation of J. Hughes, author of the Siege of Damascus. Hughes’s ‘translation’ was little more faithful than the current French versions; it is largely a work of imagination. Careful comparison does seem to show that Pope used this version, but he seems also to have used some of the very misleading French paraphrases. Elwin himself thinks Pope did not look at the original Latin.