England. These Dominicans were already the Sophists of their age,
masters of dialectic methods then in vogue, whereby disputation had
been raised to the dignity of a science. Then a scholar was looked
upon as a mere pretender who could not maintain a _thesis_
against all comers before a crowded audience of sharp-witted critics
and eager partisans, not too nice in their expressions of dissent or
approval. The exercises still kept up for the Doctor's degree in
Divinity at Oxford and Cambridge are but the shadow of what was a
reality in the past. Whether we have not lost much in the
discontinuance of the old _Acts_ and _Apponencies_, which at
least assured that a young man should be required to stand up
before a public audience to defend the reasonableness of his
opinions, may fairly be doubted. The aim of the Dominican teachers
was to turn out trained preachers furnished with all tricks of
dialectic fence, and practised to extempore speaking on the most
momentous subjects. Unfortunately the historian, when he has told us
of the arrival of his brethren, leaves us in the dark as to all their
early struggles and difficulties, and passes on to other matters with
which we are less concerned. What would we not give to know the
history, say during only twenty years, of the labours of the
Preaching Friars in England? Alas! it seems never to have been
written. We are only told enough to awaken curiousity and disappoint
it.

Happily, of the early labours of the Franciscan friars in England
much fuller details have reached us, though the very existence of the
records in which they were handed down was known to very few, and the
wonderful story had been forgotten for centuries when the appearance
of the "Monumenta Franciscana" in the series of chronicles published
under direction of the Master of the Rolls in 1858 may be said to