illustrative quotations are drawn from secular and Christian poets; even authorities contemporary with the writer, as Eugenius of Toledo, are cited. If it be the fact that the grammar was extensively used by Aldhelm within a very short time after its composition, it may be during the lifetime of Julian, we have a striking tribute to the reputation it enjoyed, and a yet more striking evidence of a literary commerce between Spain and Britain: a commerce of which the traces, liturgical and other, have yet to be collected and appreciated.
In liturgy, lastly, important reforms of the Toletan Use are attributed to Julian by his biographer Felix. But details are wanting. In the range of his activity, but not in the permanence of his achievement, Julian surpasses Isidore.
An obscure but interesting figure at this period is the Abbot St Valerius († 695) from whom we have some amusing autobiographical writings. Whether by his own fault, or, as he would have us believe, by that of his neighbours, Valerius was condemned to a very turbulent existence. He was continually being hounded out of some retreat in which he had settled, deceived by his favourite pupils, robbed of his books, and generally victimised. There is a personal note in his narratives which engages the attention. They also supply us with evidence of the existence of at least one rare book in the writer's milieu. In one of several visions of the next world which he records is an image which cannot but be derived from a certain Apocalypse of Baruch, now extant only in Greek and Old Slavonic. The seer, a youth named Baldarius, is permitted to watch the rising of the sun from close by. The orb comes up very swiftly and immensely bright; and it is preceded by a huge bird, red in colour but darker towards the tail, whose function is to mitigate the intense heat of the sun by flapping its wings. The bird is the Phoenix, as we learn from Baruch, and, so far as is known at present, this particular fable is peculiar to Baruch. It is fair to infer the survival of this rare Apocalypse in Spain in the seventh century: whether or not under Priscillianist influence, non liquet.
The chain of Spanish writers has now been traced down to the end of the seventh century, and we have seen evidence of the preservation of considerable collections of ancient literature, both pagan and Christian, in the peninsula. Much of this must have had a continuous existence in the country, but much also must have been imported from Africa under the stress of invasion. That same stress now fell upon Spain. The Moorish invasion, culminating in the great defeat of the Christian arms in 711, put an end to literary enterprise for the time. Spain dropped out of the race. But she had made one great contribution to the equipment of European scholarship in the Etymologiae of Isidore.
What is the record of the region which we now call France during the corresponding period? The educational apparatus with which she was provided at the beginning of it was as complete as any country
