Doctor Mirabilis Read Online Free PDF

it became evident that the lector
     was asleep. Adam took Roger by the elbow and led him, tiptoeing, to the door.
    ‘Thou’rt fortunate,’ Adam murmured in his ear. ‘Visit me tomorrow after sext, when we’ll conspire how to see’t brought about.
     Now thou must go.’
    ‘I am most deeply—’
    ‘Hush, no more. It is he, not I, who hath done it – and more than thou wittest, as he said. Bear in mind that he may yet die;
     I would not have had thee here so early, but that he would have it so. Go, thou, speedily.’
    Bowing his head, Roger went out. The door closed behind him with that same magical soundlessness. The coldness in the black
     corridor cut like knives, but he hardly marked it for the brand that was burning within his breast.

II: NORTHOVER
    It was more than hard for Roger to leave behind him, over Folly Bridge, those grammars of Priscian and Donatus, together with
     the
Barbarismus
of Donatus and Boethius’
Topics,
which were his texts in rhetoric; and the
Isagoge
of Porphyry, that great hymn and harmony of logic – all the beloved books of his trivium years, all so essential, all so
     expensive of copyists and of virgin parchment. It was even a worse wrench to have to leave in Adam Marsh’s care his precious
     works of Aristotle: the
Logica antiqua in
the eloquent translation of Boethius, the
Logica nova in the
new, zigzag, fantastical translations from Avicenna with the Arab’s heretical commentaries, the
libri naturales
from the hand of Oxford’s own John Blund, who taught them (as befitted such an idiot as Blund) as a dialectical adjunct to
     the trivium, rather than as a part of metaphysics in the quadrivium where they plainly belonged. (But that was hardly unusual,
     Roger reflected on the back of his placid horse. Had he his own way, the whole subject of rhetoric would be subsumed under
     logic.) But there was no help for it: the books had to be left behind, and that was that.
    Nevertheless, he had his copy of the
Metaphysics in
his saddlebag as he left Oxford. Nothing in the world could persuade him to leave it behind. It had been the key which had
     let him into his still unfinished quadrivium years with an understanding of the four subjects – arithmetic, geometry, astronomy,
     music – so much in advance of his masters as to excite his vocal and injudicious contempt (injudicious only because vocal,
     for Roger knew not a single student who was being taught as much Aristotle as he wanted; the masters were far behind the scholars
     there, and getting farther every day). Of course Aristotle was of no special value on music – Boethius was still the best
     authority there, once he left off reprising his descants on the consolationsof philosophy, a subject upon which he apparently had taken pains to become the dullest man in the world – but as a systematic
     summary of the world of experience in every other category, the
Metaphysics
was unique. Roger had copied it himself to be sure of having every word right; it was worth more than diamonds, which would
     have taken up far less space in the saddlebag, but which dissolve in goat’s blood. Nothing would ever dissolve the
Metaphysics
but a human mind, and that not soon.
    The horse was as cautious an idiot as John Blund, but in two or three days, it got him from inn to inn on to the marches of
     Salisbury Plain, stopping at every roadside ditch to crop the watercress. It had seemed the strongest and healthiest animal
     the courser had had for the money – six whole pounds – but it had never entered Roger’s mind to suspect that it might have
     been
overfed; yet,
it put its nose into the sweet herbs like serfs putting their elbows on table, full and waxing lazy as freemen, and as disputatious.
     At the last inn before Salisbury, he saved the price of the beast’s hay; the next morning it suddenly discovered that it knew
     how to trot.
    This far from satisfied Roger’s passionate urgency, for he had been unable to get away from the Great