could shew. The works of an Alcimus Avitus and of a Sidonius Apollinaris, however exiguous their intrinsic value, are the last links in an unbroken chain reaching back to the rise of the great schools of Gaul. After them comes the break.
The sixth century produced two writers of note who mark it in different ways. Venantius Fortunatus, born in Italy, it is true, but for the best part of his life a resident at Poitiers, is known to the generality as the author of two hymns, the Pange lingua on the Cross, the Vexilla regis used on Passion Sunday. We have from him, however, a very large mass of poetry besides these. His Life of St Martin of Tours in four books of heroic verse is for the most part merely a paraphrase of the prose Life and Dialogues of Sulpicius Severus. But his eleven books of miscellaneous pieces are full of originality and human interest. They form a chronicle of his friendly relations with the widowed queen of Chlotar I, St Radegund, and others of that house, as well as with Gregory of Tours and many prominent churchmen of France. A considerable number of the poems were sent as letters – thanks for presents and the like. Others are panegyrics, others descriptions of pleasant places: yet others are inscriptions designed for churches, such as commonly form a large ingredient in collections of Christian Latin verse. The best, however, and those from which we gain the most kindly impression of the personality of Fortunatus, are those which were called forth by the deaths of the friends and kindred of Radegund. These are uniformly entitled Epitaphs, but their length forbids us to suppose that they can have been inscribed on tombs. They may have been recited; but their real purpose is that of the Consolationes of an earlier time. They were meant to be circulated in writing among those whom the death had touched most nearly. These, with his hymns, constitute the best claim of Fortunatus to be remembered as a writer. Yet his skill in handling light verse should not pass unmentioned. His abuse of the river Gers (Egircio, I. 21) and of the cook who appropriated his boat at Metz (VI. 8) are quite worth reading.
Upon the whole the notable thing about Fortunatus is his avoidance of what was becoming a pseudo-classical vein. The form of his poems is old (the elegiac metre predominates), and rococo ornaments in the shape of allusions to mythology are not wanting; but we are impressed by the absence of artificiality, and by the presence of a freshness and simplicity which we miss in Sidonius and Avitus. The poems prepare us for a new epoch, while they have not lost touch with the old.
Of Gregory of Tours († 594), the other famous writer of this century and country, it may be said with more truth that he had lost, touch with the old. That is, at any rate, his own opinion. A well-known passage in the Prologue to his History of the Franks represents his contemporaries as saying, "Alas for our days! for the study of letters is gone from among us." He is, moreover, given to apologising on his own
