Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/202

184 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. were mighty factors in mediaeval life and thought, and their lives bore close relation to monasticism, though not all were passed in monasteries. Of these five, Jerome was the least. He was a gifted not a great man. His was a sensitive, irascible, al- most hysterical temperament, but with fine touches of sympathy and understanding. He had an espe- cially sympathetic understanding of women ; there was much of the woman in this great director of widows and virgins. He was an admirable scholar, a violent controversialist, and a great letter-writer.^ He was possessed with a fiery enthusiasm for Christianity and celibate life, which perhaps was even over-ex- pressed in his letters; for Jerome always felt drar matically and imaginatively. At all events, he led an ascetic and effusively celibate life in Rome and afterwards in his retreat at Bethlehem. His enthu- siasm for Christian scholarship proved itself real in his mighty labors upon Biblical translations. Jerome's temper, appreciations, and affections clam- ored ceaselessly at the barriers of his austerely con- ceived life. This heart, shut against fleshly lures, has much confessorial tenderness for women; and this mind which deems that a Ciceronian is not a Christian, continually hungers for the fair classic literature. Although a Greek scholar, it was his own Latin that made part of him ; and his preferences appear in his letters. These contain more quotations from Virgil than from all other pagan writers together ; less frequently he quotes from Horace, and has scattered lines from other classics, Naevius, Persius, Terence, Lucan. 1 Post, p. 211.