He had the keenest love of poetry, music and art.
But his vexatious interference with colonial rights and customs aroused the keenest resentment, and on the 18th of April 1689, soon after news of the arrival of William, prince of Orange, in England reached Boston, the colonists deposed and arrested him.
He thereby gave the signal for the age-long conflict between Nominalism and Realism, which exercised the keenest intellects among the Schoolmen, while the crowning work of his life, the Consolatio Philosophiae (524), was repeatedly expounded and imitated, and reproduced in renderings that were among the earliest literary products of the vernacular languages of modern Europe.
The smartest epigrams, the fairest similes, the keenest satires, spoken or sung on such occasions, were treasured in the memory of the hearers and carried by them to their homes.
But, though this method has been applied in its fullness, and that by the keenest exegetes, there remains a consciousness that it has failed to solve many of the problems of the book.
