hat we find
a series of discourses by a known preacher written and pronounced
in French. It is maintained that these Latin sermons, though prepared
in the language of the Church, were delivered, when addressed to lay
audiences, in the vernacular, and that those composite sermons in
the macaronic style, that is, partly in French, partly in Latin, which
appear in the thirteenth century and are frequent in the fifteenth,
were the work of reporters or redactors among the auditory. On the
other hand, it is argued that both Latin and French sermons were
pronounced as each might seem suitable, before the laity, and that
the macaronic style was actually practised in the pulpit. Perhaps
we may accept the opinion that the short and simple homilies designed
for the people, little esteemed as compositions, were rarely thought
worthy of preservation in a Latin form; those discourses which remain
to us, if occasionally used before an unlearned audience, seem to
have been specially intended for clerkly hearers. The sermons of St.
Bernard, which have been preserved in Latin and in a French
translation of the thirteenth century, were certainly not his
eloquent popular improvisations; they are doctrinal, with crude or
curious allegorisings of Holy Scripture. Those of Maurice de Sully,
Archbishop of Paris, probably also translated from the Latin, are
simpler in manner and more practical in their teaching; but in these
characteristics they stand apart from the other sermons of the twelfth
century.

It was not until the mendicant orders, Franciscans and Dominicans,
began their labours that preaching, as preserved to us, was truly
laicised and popularised. During the thirteenth century the work of
the pulpit came to be conceived as an art which could be taught;
collections of anecdotes and illustrations--_exempla_--for the
enlivening of sermons, manuals for the use of preachers were formed;
rules and precepts were set forth; themes for popular discourse were
proposed and enlarged upon, until at length original thought and
invention ceased; the preacher's art was turned into an easy trade.
The effort to be popular often resulted in pulpit buffoonery. When
GERSON preached at court or to the people towards the close of the
fourteenth century, gravely exhorting high and low to practical
duties, with tender or passionate appeals to religious feeling, his
sermons were noble exceptions to the common practice. And the descent
from Gerson to even h