throughout the city that he would talk, there resulted such a
concourse of almost all the doctors with their scholars, to hear
his pleasing voice, that scarcely could the amplest house have
held the auditors.

And with reason, for he so supported with rhetorical
persuasiveness his original, wide-awake treatment of the Laws and
Canons, and so embellished his points both with figures and
flowers of speech and with pithy ideas, and so applied the
sayings of philosophers and authors, which he inserted in
fitting places with marvellous cleverness, that the more learned
and erudite the congregation, the more eagerly and attentively
did they apply ears and minds to listening and memorizing. Of a
truth they were led on and besmeared with words so sweet that,
hanging, as it were, in suspense on the lips of the
speaker,--though the address was long and involved, of a sort
that is wont to be tedious to many,--they found it impossible to
be fatigued, or even sated, with hearing the man.

And so the scholars strove to take down all his talks, word for
word, as they emanated from his lips, and to adopt them with
great eagerness. Moreover, on a certain day when the concourse
from all parts to hear him was great, when the lecture was over
and was followed by a murmur of favorable applause from all the
throng, a certain distinguished Doctor who both had lectured on
the Arts at Paris and long studied on the laws at Bologna, whose
name was Master Roger the Norman, ... broke out openly in
expressions of this sort: "There is not such knowledge under the
sun, and if it were by chance reported at Paris, it would, beyond
a doubt, carry incomparable weight there, far more so than