nd. Were he alive to-day, he might feel more
in tune with the best of the pagans than with most contemporary philosophic
thought.

In yet one more respect Boethius belongs to the company of the schoolmen.
He not only put into circulation many precious philosophical notions,
served as channel through which various works of Aristotle passed into the
schools, and handed down to them a definite Aristotelian method for
approaching the problem of faith; he also supplied material for that
classification of the various sciences which is an essential accompaniment
of every philosophical movement, and of which the Middle Ages felt the
value.[5] The uniform distribution into natural sciences, mathematics and
theology which he recommends may be traced in the work of various teachers
up to the thirteenth century, when it is finally accepted and defended by
St. Thomas in his commentary on the _De Trinitate_.

A seventeenth-century translation of the _Consolatio Philosophiae_ is here
presented with such alterations as are demanded by a better text, and the
requirements of modern scholarship. There was, indeed, not much to do, for
the rendering is most exact. This in a translation of that date is not a
little remarkable. We look for fine English and poetry in an Elizabethan;
but we do not often get from him such loyalty to the original as is here
displayed.

Of the author "I.T." nothing is known. He may have been John Thorie, a
Fleming born in London in 1568, and a B.A. of Christ Church, 1586. Thorie
"was a person well skilled in certain tongues, and a noted poet of his
times" (Wood, _Athenae Oxon._ ed. Bliss, i. 624), but his known
translations are apparently all from the Spanish.[6]

Our translator dedicates his "Five books of Philosophical Comfort" to the
Dowager Countess of Dorset, widow of Thomas Sackville, who was part author
of _A Mirror for Magistrates_ and _Gorboduc_, and who, we learn from I.T.'s
preface, meditated a similar work. I.T. does not unduly flatter his
patroness, and he tells her plainly that she will not understand the
philosophy of the book, though the theological and practical parts may be
within her scope.

The _Opuscula Sacra_ have never before, to our knowledge, been translated.
In reading and rendering them we have been greatly helped by two mediaeval
commentaries: one by John the Scot (edited by E.K. Rand in Traube's
_Quellen und Untersuchungen_, vol. i. pt. 2, Munich, 1906); the other by
Gilbert de la