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22

DECLINE OF LETTERS

had lost its vigour and its wide diffusion in the troubled years that followed the emperor s death. Indeed barely fifteen years had passed since that event, when the prelates of Gaul appealed to Lewis the Pious to carry out the mandate issued by the Roman council, and to save the ruin into which the educational institutions of the country were already falling, We earnestly and humbly petition your highness, they said, that you, following the ensample of your father, will cause public schools to be established in at least three fitting places of your realm, that the labour of your father and yourself may not through neglect (which God forbid) utterly decay and perish : so, they added, shall great benefit and honour abound to God s holy church, and to you a great reward and everlasting remembrance. Still the impulse given to civilisation by the work of Charles, however intermittent its effects may appear, dying out, as it seemed, by degrees until the second revival of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, was never wholly lost. Nor was the decline of literature so rapid as is frequently supposed;^[1] the change is rather from an initiating to an appropriating age. In the eager life of Charles s day men had leisure for independent study and production : under his successors they were, as a rule, content with a reputation for learning. To be well-read and to reproduce old material, was all that was asked of scholars ; and the few who overpassed the conventional

↑ For example, Dr. Hermann Renter, Geschichte cler religiosen Aufklarung im Mittelalter, 1. 16, Berlin 1875, has no , justification in inferring from the words of Claudius of Turin, Nee saecularis litteraturae didici studium nee ali- quando exinde magistrum habui (praef. in Levit., Jo. Mabillon, Vet. Analect. 90, ed. Paris 1723 folio) that instruction was again becoming limited to the sphere of theology ; since Claudius was brought up in Spain, when Chris- tian letters were at a low ebb. Dr. Reuter is equally unfortu- nate in referring (ibid. 1. 15 and n. 7) to the same writer (praef. exposit. in ep. ad Eph., Mabillon 91) for evidence of the general decay of letters. Claudius is speaking of sacred learning; he has no interest in any other. On the state of literature under the later Carolines compare Carl von Noorden’s Hinkmar Erzbischof von Rheims, 56, Bonn J863; a dissertation written by an bis- torical scholar who has but re- cently and prematurely passed from us, and for whose work and memory I would here express my gratitude and my personal respect.

[1] For example, Dr. Hermann Renter, Geschichte cler religiosen Aufklarung im Mittelalter, 1. 16, Berlin 1875, has no , justification in inferring from the words of Claudius of Turin, Nee saecularis litteraturae didici studium nee ali- quando exinde magistrum habui (praef. in Levit., Jo. Mabillon, Vet. Analect. 90, ed. Paris 1723 folio) that instruction was again becoming limited to the sphere of theology ; since Claudius was brought up in Spain, when Chris- tian letters were at a low ebb. Dr. Reuter is equally unfortu- nate in referring (ibid. 1. 15 and n. 7) to the same writer (praef. exposit. in ep. ad Eph., Mabillon 91) for evidence of the general decay of letters. Claudius is speaking of sacred learning; he has no interest in any other. On the state of literature under the later Carolines compare Carl von Noorden’s Hinkmar Erzbischof von Rheims, 56, Bonn J863; a dissertation written by an bis- torical scholar who has but re- cently and prematurely passed from us, and for whose work and memory I would here express my gratitude and my personal respect.

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