§ 3. The De Consolatione Philosophiae of Boethius.

By far the most important of these works was the famous treatise of Boethius. It was the philosophical vade-mecum of the Middle Ages, and countless scholars during a thousand years knew little else of abstract reasoning save what they found in its pages. The influence that it exercised on the expression of abstract thinking during many centuries is hardly conceivable by us moderns, who can range freely over the best of ancient classical literature and wield a philosophical vocabulary ready made for us. Its influence and popularity, indeed, as a book of practical piety, can only be Edition: current; Page: [xvii]compared with that of the later Imitation of Christ, and the earlier Cicero’s De Officiis. Hundreds of manuscripts of it are still to be found in dozens of libraries, some of them going back to the tenth century; and it was one of the first books printed in Europe. Wherever the rude tongues of mediaeval Europe began to be articulate in prose, versions of the De Consolatione Philosophiae in the vernacular appeared. Of these early translations Alfred’s was the first, and it was followed after the lapse of about a hundred years by a literal rendering into the Alemannic dialect of the Old High German language made at the famous monastery of St. Gall by the monk Notker.

To the eleventh century belongs a fragment of a manuscript now in the Public Library of Orleans containing part of a free rendering or imitation in old Provençal. In the course of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries there appeared four versions in French, the first by the famous Jehan de Meun, who dedicated it to Philippe le Bel. In England no less a poet than Geoffrey Chaucer made a prose translation. He was followed by nearly a dozen others in the following centuries, including Queen Elizabeth, and the last English version was published as late as the year 1897. We have said nothing, be it noted, of Italian, Spanish, and Greek versions, all of which had begun to appear before the end of the fifteenth century. Other tongues have also done their share in popularizing the Consolations. It has frequently been annotated and imitated, and it has comforted hundreds in their day of affliction. Our own Sir Thomas More had it with him in prison, and even wrote an imitation of it. Leslie, Edition: current; Page: [xviii]Bishop of Ross, sent an imitation of it to his royal and captive mistress in 1572. Its influence on European literature has been immense. Traces have been found in the ancient English poem of Beowulf. Chaucer’s poems are steeped in it. Gower, Lydgate, and Spenser drank inspiration at this fountain, as the author of the Roman de la Rose in France, and the greater Dante and Boccaccio in Italy had done in their day.

The sad surroundings under which the Consolation of Philosophy was written have ever found a responsive chord of sympathy in the hearts of the oppressed, and never more readily than in those turbulent times when the great ones of the earth were liable to be reft in a day of rank and honours at the nod of a capricious tyrant.