and in their poems, to the sound learning imparted in the great English schools. What they wrote has some flavour of the elaboration characteristic of Aldhelm as distinguished from Bode. The acrostic and the riddle are in favour: Boniface even copies, in his verses to Duddus, the "figured" poem of Publilius Optatianus, in which certain letters picked out of the lines form a pattern or picture, and also compose distinct lines or sentences. It is more to the purpose however to draw attention to the frequent requests for books which Boniface prefers to his friends in England, the fruit of which we may perhaps see now in some of the small but precious group of manuscripts still preserved at Fulda. Among the treasures of the Würzburg library too are books with English connexions: in one is mention of a Worcester abbess[1]. The presence of others may be due to the Irish missionary and martyr Kilian († 689), among them the unique copy of the works of the heretic Priscillian, or, as Dom Morin now inclines to think, of his companion Instantius. It is thought, I may add, that the Graeco-Latin Codex Laudianus of the Acts has made the journey between Britain and the Continent twice. First brought to England by Theodore and Hadrian, and there used by Bede, it travelled to Germany with some members of the Bonifacian circle, and found a home there till the seventeenth century, when a second Archbishop of Canterbury, Laud, was instrumental in bringing it once again to this country along with many other spoils of German libraries.
It will eventually be possible, thanks to the work of the great palaeographers of our own time, to write a history of the transmission of ancient literature, and to trace its influence upon individual authors of the early Middle Ages by the help of our rapidly growing knowledge of the styles of writing peculiar to the great centres of learning, monastic and other, and by the indications, which single manuscripts are gradually being induced to yield, of their own parentage and wanderings. But the time for attempting this is not yet: many monographs have to be written and multitudinous details correlated; and the reader of a survey such as this must be content to be told that the cloud which hangs over the literary life of the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries is in process of being thinned: it is beyond hope that it can be wholly dispersed.
One other name demands notice before we close our review of pre-Carolingian literature. Virgilius, Bishop of Salzburg, has made a considerable figure in many a text-book in the capacity of an enlightened cosmographer; or of an early martyr of science, persecuted and silenced by clerical obscurantists because of his belief in the Antipodes. We have not a line of his writing: our only life of him makes no allusion to his secular learning: all that we know of this side of him is confined to a couple of lines in a letter of Pope Zacharias to St Boniface, and to
- ↑ The MS. is of Jerome on Ecclesiastes (cent. vi): the owner was Abbess Cuthsuuitha (690-700).
