our favour, wherefore we deserved to find them most special
furtherers of our wishes and promoters thereof in act and deed,
who compassing land and sea, traversing the circuit of the world,
and ransacking the universities and high schools of various
provinces, were zealous in combatting for our desires, in the
sure and certain hope of reward. What leveret could escape
amidst so many keen-sighted hunters? What little fish could
evade in turn their hooks and nets and snares? From the body of
the Sacred Law down to the booklet containing the fallacies of
yesterday, nothing could escape these searchers. Was some devout
discourse uttered at the fountain-head of Christian faith, the
holy Roman Curia, or was some strange question ventilated with
novel arguments; did the solidity of Paris, which is now more
zealous in the study of antiquity than in the subtle
investigation of truth, did English subtlety, which illumined by
the lights of former times is always sending forth fresh rays of
truth, produce anything to the advancement of science or the
declaration of the faith, this was instantly poured still fresh
into our ears, ungarbled by any babbler, unmutilated by any
trifler, but passing straight from the purest of wine-presses
into the vats of our memory to be clarified.

But whenever it happened that we turned aside to the cities and
places where the mendicants we have mentioned had their convents,
we did not disdain to visit their libraries and any other
repositories of books; nay, there we found heaped up amid the
utmost poverty the utmost riches of wisdom. We discovered in
their fardels and baskets not only crumbs falling from the
masters' table for the dogs, but the shewbread without leaven and
the bread of angels having in it all that is delicious; and