The seven tracts or treatises before us were published in 1521 in a
little quarto volume: "Imprynted at London in Poules chyrchyarde at
the sygne of the Trynyte, by Henry Pepwell. In the yere of our lorde
God, M.CCCCC.XXI., the xvi. daye of Nouembre." They may, somewhat
loosely speaking, be regarded as belonging to the fourteenth
century, though the first and longest of them professes to be but a
translation of the work of the great Augustinian mystic of an
earlier age.

St. Bernard, Richard of St. Victor, and St. Bonaventura--all three
very familiar figures to students of Dante's Paradiso--are the chief
influences in the story of English mysticism. And, through the
writings of his latter-day followers, Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton,
and the anonymous author of the Divine Cloud of Unknowing, Richard
of St. Victor is, perhaps, the most important of the three.

Himself either a Scot or an Irishman by birth, Richard entered the
famous abbey of St. Victor, a house of Augustinian canons near
Paris, some time before 1140, where he became the chief pupil of the
great mystical doctor and theologian whom the later Middle Ages
regarded as a second Augustine, Hugh of St. Victor. After Hugh's
death (1141), Richard succeeded to his influence as a teacher, and
completed his work in creating the mystical theology of the Church.
His masterpiece, De Gratia Contemplationis, known also as Benjamin
Major, in five books, is a work of marvellous spiritual insight,
unction, and eloquence, upon which Dante afterwards based the whole
mystical psychology of the Paradiso.2 In it Richard shows how the
soul passes upward through the six steps of contemplation--in
imagination, in reason, in understanding--gradually discarding all
sensible objects of thought; until, in the sixth stage, it