This purpose is sometimes carried on by a sort of migratory instinct, sometimes by the spirit of conquest; at one time avarice drives men from their homes, at another they are actuated by a thirst of knowledge; where none of these causes can operate, the sanctity of particular places attracts men from the most distant quarters.

It was this motive which sent thousands in those ages to Jerusalem and Rome, and now, in a full tide, impels half the world annually to Mecca.
By those voyages the seeds of various kinds of knowledge and improvement were at different times imported into England.

They were cultivated in the leisure and retirement of monasteries; otherwise they could not have been cultivated at all: for it was altogether necessary to draw certain men from the general rude and fierce society, and wholly to set a bar between them and the barbarous life of the rest of the world, in order to fit them for study and the cultivation of arts and science.
Accordingly, we find everywhere in the first institutions for the propagation of knowledge amongst any people, that those who followed it were set apart and secluded from the mass of the community.
[Sidenote: A.D.

682] The great ecclesiastical chair of this kingdom, for near a century, was filled by foreigners.

They were nominated by the Popes, who were in that age just or politic enough to appoint persons of a merit in some degree adequate to that important charge.