whose name has been lost with the preface and the third book of the Gesta. It was written down at the request of Charles the Fat, who when staying at St Gall in 883 had been greatly delighted with Notker's tales of his great-grandfather and his father. Almost all the picturesque anecdotes that we have of Charlemagne come from this book; tales of war and peace, of embassies from the East and what they brought, of the Emperor's dealings with his clergy, behaviour in church, dress, are to be found here, many doubtless true, others shewing the beginning of a Charlemagne mythology. The loss of the third book is particularly exasperating, for in it were promised recollections of the hero's every-day conversation.
Much more might be said of Notker, of his letters, his poems, his humour, his treatise on the study of the Fathers (a parallel to the Institutions of Cassiodorus), but proportion must be observed, and we must bid farewell to a man both gifted and amiable.
Our second St Gall author is Ekkehard, the first of five persons of that name who are prominent in the Abbey's annals. He died in 973. Early in life he began the work by which he has deserved to be remembered, the short epic of Waltharius. It is a heroic tale, a single episode in a warrior's career. Waltharius escapes with his love from the Hungarian court in which both he and she were kept as hostages, is pursued and successfully defends himself against great odds. The story ends happily, and none of the Latin poems of all this age is better worth reading. There is little of the flavour of a school exercise about it, and there is a great deal of the freshness of the best romances in the vernacular.
With the exception of the Gesta Karoli, most of the writings we have touched upon recently have been in verse. We will give a few paragraphs to some of the remaining poets. John the Deacon, a Roman, writing in 875, gives us a curious versification of a curious old piece called the Caena Cypriani, and mingles it with personal satire. The whole thing is a jeu d'esprit, written, as Lapôtre has shewn, on the occasion of the coronation of Charles the Bald at Rome, and was recited at a banquet where were present various notabilities (Anastasius the Librarian among them) who are smartly hit off.
Hucbald of St Amand's Eclogue in praise of baldness, produced about 885, must be passed with averted eye. Every word of its 146 lines begins with the letter C.
The early part of the tenth century gives us two anonymous books of some slight celebrity, the Gesta Berengarii, a panegyric on that Emperor by an Italian who knew some Greek, and the Ecbasis captivi by a monk of Toul, "the oldest beast-epic of the Middle Ages." Animals are the actors, and tales in which they figure are woven together not without spirit. But more famous in respect of the sex of the writer and of the vehicle she has employed are the works of Hrotsvitha, a nun of Gandersheim who wrote about 960. They are collected into three books
