To the lover of ancient learning and the classical spirit, who looks forward from the fast-fading twilight of the fifth or backward from the dazzling sunrise of the fifteenth century, there seems at the first glance to lie between these two epochs a period of perfectly impenetrable blackness. Like most dark places, however, this murky millennium proves to him who has once found the courage to plunge in and explore it less blind and impassable than it looked from without. To the eye that steadily confronts them the shadows lighten; a glimmering pathway is first discerned, then landmarks, and finally footprints of more than one traveler. The life of the race is after all continuous. The customs and institutions which served mankind under one order of things are found reparable after seeming ruin, and capable of being adapted, with certain modifications, to wholly new conditions of existence. Take the case of life in a mediæval abbey and its dependencies. It was Châteaubriand, perhaps, who first suggested the notion that it was, at least on its material side, only a natural development or adaptation of life within the precincts of a great Roman

villa. The abbot corresponded to the proprietor. The monks were like the freedmen of the great patrician, who cultivated letters, art, and science under the shelter of the villa proper. In both cases the property comprised a more or less extensive area of outlying territory, the inhabitants of whose farms and villages were, to all intents and purposes, attached to the glebe, lived by supplying the central establishment with the fruits of their industry, and expected protection from it in times of common peril.

The great Roman overlord had indeed, in most cases, other and richer sources of revenue than the labor of these humble tenants, and so had the mediæval abbot in the voluntary offerings of pious pilgrims to whatever saintly shrine or shrines might lie within his jurisdiction. The Benedictine abbey of St. Riguier, near Abbeville, for example, possessed and governed, at its most flourishing period, fourteen towns, thirty villages, and an "infinite number" of farms, while the offerings at the tomb of the holy Richiarius amounted to about four hundred thousand dollars yearly.

This was in Gaul under the Merovingian kings. A hundred years later,

under Charlemagne, certain of the more famous and venerable abbeys, like those of St. Martin at Tours and St. Hilary at Poictiers, had considerably declined in wealth and importance; but the monastic establishments of the kingdom, taken collectively, were at the height of their dignity and influence. The great abbots occupied a singularly independent position. They were bound by the terms of their tenure of landed property to give a certain material support to their temporal masters; but they stoutly resisted any assumption of authority by the local bishops, against whose claims they were beginning to appeal to the high and general court of Christendom at Rome. At that time and for many succeeding years a monastic life opened one of the shortest roads to court favor, such as it then was, and afforded absolutely the only chance for the cultivation of letters under conditions of peace and comparative refinement. The number of those who affected such conditions and yearned for such culture was not large, but among them one might almost say foremost among them, at his own particular epoch was a certain abbot of Ferrières, in central France, by name Servatus Lupus. Some hundred and twenty of this man's private letters have been saved from the wreckage of his time. They reveal a mobile and inquisitive mind, athirst from its first conscious hour for the springs of human learning, and with an inherent attraction toward pagan antiquity which would have caused him to revel in the thought that his cloister life was but an evolution or adaptation of that of a Roman senator in retreat. These letters reflect at the same time so vivid a light on some of the more important actors and stirring events of the writer's chaotic period that the only wonder is they should have been so generally neglected.

1 The epithet Servatus, the Saved, is sup posed to have been bestowed or assumed to commemorate his recovery from a dangerous

1

Lupus was born during the last decade of the reign of Charles the Great, probably in the year 805 or 806. Of his birthplace we only know that it was somewhere in Gaul, of his rank that it was noble, of his kindred that two of his brothers were successively bishops of Auxerre, while a certain learned and saintly Marquard, abbot of the cloister of Prüm, not far from Treves, was a near relation of Lupus as well as a devoted friend.

Lupus received his early training in the monastery of which he was afterwards to be the head, and Ferrières was a place with a history. The cloister occupied a commanding site between the Seine and the Loire, at the point where these two rivers approach nearest to each other in the modern department of Loiret. Dense forests, cleft by wild and all but impassable valleys, encircled the spot, and the conventual stronghold probably owed to its exceptional position the immunity which it long enjoyed from the incursions of those Norse pirates whose descendants triumphed at Hastings two centuries later.

The church of Ferrières was an extremely ancient building, dating, it was believed, from the first introduction of Christianity into Gaul; and in the later days of Lupus's own rule it became a labor of love with him to restore, or rather replace, the venerable structure, and furnish it with a leaden roof, the material for which he secured in Britain. The ties between Ferrières and the Church in England were numerous and strong. The abbey had even been held for the years between 782 and 796 by the celebrated Alcuin, who came from that centre of light and learning the great monastery at York to open what was known as the School of the Palace in the house of Charlemagne.

It is plain that the young Lupus soon

illness, or perhaps his escape from death at the battle of Toulouse, where he was taken prisoner in 844.

came to the end of what he could learn at Ferrières, where there was no such complete and systematic course of instruction as that for which the ambitious pupil pined. Such he found, however, at Fulda, in the diocese of Treves, the Primat of the German abbeys, founded by St. Boniface, and the resting-place of his dust, where the most important school of the ninth century was then flourishing under the headship of the Abbot Rabanus Maurus.

From Fulda, where he seems to have passed the active and animated years between twenty-five and thirty, and where he formed the chief friendships of his life, Lupus wrote the first letter of the collection which we possess. It is addressed to one of the most interesting men of that or of any time, to no less a person than that Einhard, or Eginhard, the secretary and exceedingly graphic biographer of Charlemagne, who had shared with the children of the emperor the advantages of Alcuin's palaceschool, and was possibly also the son-inlaw of Charlemagne. Every one knows the romantic story of the young scribe to whom the Princess Emma accorded her favors, who lingered too late one winter night in his lady's turret chamber, until the courtyard of the palace had been whitened by a stealthy snowfall, sure to betray the footprints of the returning lover; and how, to avoid discovery, the vigorous young princesswho was evidently a "menskful maiden of might," like Brunehild — lifted him upon her shoulders and bore him to his own quarters. But Charlemagne was wakeful that night, and pacing and peering about, as an anxious monarch may do, he witnessed this extraordinary transit "by the cold, white light of the

moon."

The mixture of shrewdness and magnanimity which led the emperor first to exact a full confession from his protégé, and then to offer him the hand of his daughter in honorable marriage, is no more than might have been ex

pected of the great Charles. But alas for romance! only one monkish chronicler has preserved the tale in this ar tistic and symmetrical form, while in the list carefully given by Eginhard himself of Charlemagne's children, legitimate and illegitimate, there is no mention of any Emma or Imma. The name of Eginhard's dearly loved wife is usually written in the latter way. They lived long and happily together as a married pair; as neighbors, evidently, and with frequent and tender fraternal intercourse, even after Eginhard became the lay abbot of the monastery which he himself had founded at Seligenstadt.

It is to this place that Lupus writes a modest and graceful letter of self-introduction; praying for the privilege of Eginhard's acquaintance, expressing admiration of his Life of Charlemagne, and asking, after an apt quotation or two from the Satires of Horace and the Tusculan Disputations, for the loan of some of the abbot's worldly books.

"Having once overpassed the limits of modesty, I make bold to pray that you will entrust me, while I am staying here, with certain of your texts, though to be sure I have asked a far greater favor in your friendship than I could receive from your books. These, however, are the ones which I should like: first, Tully on Rhetoric, of which I possess only a very imperfect copy; . . . then, under the general head of Rhetoric, by the same author, three books of discussions or dialogues on the Orator. I think you must have these, because I found written in the catalogue of your library, after a mention of the book to Herennius and some other alien matter, Cicero on Rhetoric, and then Commentary on the Books of Cicero. I should also like the Attic Nights of A. Gellius; and there are a great many others in the same catalogue which, if God give me grace with you, I should most particularly desire to have, after these are sent back, and to copy while I am here.

By complying with my request you will show that you pardon my presumption, and you will fill with the sweetest fruit of learning one who has long been digging at its bitter roots."

In the next letter the vanities of scholarship are forgotten in a heartfelt expression of simple human feeling:

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Lupus to Eginhard, his dearly beloved preceptor.

"I have been unspeakably shocked by the sad news of the death of your venerable wife, and I wish more than ever that I could be with you now to lighten your sorrow by my sympathy, or else perhaps to assuage it through earnest discourse concerning the thoughts which are suggested by many an eloquent passage of Holy Writ. Meanwhile, until God suffers me to join you, I beseech you to be mindful of that universal lot which sinful humanity has deservedly incurred, and to endure your calamity in a brave and collected spirit. Do not you cower before misfortune, who presented so steadfast a front to the insidious temptations of prosperity. Rally that manly fortitude to which you would incite any one you truly loved who might be stricken by a like misfortune, and call upon the name of the Lord. And may all good be with you." Eginhard's answer is long and affecting. He appreciates his young friend's sympathy, and is far from resenting that clarion call to heroic endurance which he finds himself too old and too broken to obey.

"Eginhard to his Lupus, greeting. "My overwhelming sorrow for the loss of her who was once my most faithful wife, and afterward for long my dearest sister and companion, has well-nigh killed in me all interest and care whether for my own affairs or those of my friends. . . . I have by me the writings of noble and learned men, teachers never to be despised, but worthy of all attention and obedience, such as the glorious martyr Cyprian, and those most illustrious exVOL. LXVIII. - NO. 410.

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positors of the divine word Augustine and Jerome; and I have endeavored to take heart from their wise and bracing counsels, to rise up under the load of my sorrow, and earnestly to consider what I ought to feel concerning the departure of my most dear companion, having seen 'the end of her mortality rather than her life.' I have tried even to force upon myself, by the exercise of reason, what is wont to come only after a long lapse of years; I mean the closing of the wound which my spirit received through the sudden calamity of that most grievous loss, the beginning of cure by the remedy of spontaneous consolation, But the stab was too deep for such easy methods. . . . Perchance you may marvel at me, and say that grief of this kind was not meant to endure forever, as if it were in the mourner's power to set limits to that whose beginnings he could neither foresee nor control. Nay, nay; my belief is, and your arguments will not shake it, that my anguish for the death of my best beloved will last until the appointed end of that space of time which God has allotted me in this sad and transitory world. . . . It cannot be, methinks, that I shall long survive, and yet I do not at all know how long. But this one thing is sure: a babe may die soon; an old man cannot last long.'"

6

It will be perceived that the learned abbot has again fallen abbot has again fallen unconsciously, as it would seem into quotation. This time it is the rather stinging reply of St. Jerome's friend Marcella to her importunate old suitor which he wrests to his own sorry comfort.

Lupus wrote Eginhard another long letter upon the same subject, but the reader will hardly need to be informed that he found nothing new to say. He also arranged to pay the sad old man a visit on his way back from Fulda to Ferrières, and apparently carried out his

1 He is quoting Pliny's beautiful remark on the death of his old friend Virginius Rufus.

purpose early in 836. This was the year, also, of his first appearance at the Frankish court, for in 837 we find him writing to his brother Reginbert:

"Last year, through the influence of friends, I was presented to the emperor, and also to the queen, by whom I was most graciously received; . . . and now, on the 22d of September, I am about starting for the palace, the queen herself having earnestly pressed me to come; so that many think some special honor will soon be conferred upon me."

The royal pair with whom Lupus thus made acquaintance were Louis the Debonair, more properly the Pious, the son of Charlemagne, and his second wife, Judith, "whom," says Eginhard, "he chose after an inspection of almost all the maidens of the realm who were of noble birth." Louis must have been attracted, one would think, in this high-spirited and unscrupulous woman, by qualities the very reverse of his own. She schemed boldly and successfully, against tremendous odds, to secure the succession of her own son, Charles the Bald, to that portion of the vast empire of his grandfather which corresponds most nearly to the France of to-day; but she did not at this time fulfill the pleasant dreams of Lupus, who had some years yet to wait for his preferment.

He carried back with him, however, to the forest solitude of Ferrières a reputation for learning which caused him to be received with deep respect by Odo, the abbot, and he was immediately made rector of the convent school. He thought he discerned among the denizens of his old monastery a reviving interest in the things of the mind which bade fair to lighten his labors as an instructor, and there is a very interesting fragment extant of a sort of report which Lupus appears to have addressed some years later to the members of a synod convened in the diocese of Sens, in which he says that though he has had to deplore the untimely death of some of his brightest

pupils, yet others have come to take their places who are either full of early promise, or who, "being already proficient, desire still further to increase their attainments."

There is also a curious letter of the time immediately succeeding Lupus's return to Ferrières addressed to one Immo, Bishop of Noyon, who was afterward murdered by the Norman pirates. Immo would seem to have cautioned Lupus against intellectual pride, and perhaps even hinted at the ungodly nature of some of his literary pursuits, for the lat ter replies with a suspicion of warmth:

"I do not quite understand why you should be so anxious to know what books I read or wrote in Germany, unless you wish to make an example of me by proposing a difficult dilemma, and so convicting me either of ostentation or of youthful rashness. I can only say quite simply that I passed my time there chiefly in reading, and in the preparation of certain small textbooks which might serve as aids to learning and remedies for oblivion; and it was by no means for love of the German tongue, as has been ridiculously suggested, that I underwent the burden of so severe a daily labor.

"However," he adds with his wonted sweetness, "I thank you for reminding me, on divine authority, that I ought to be watchful and preserve my humility of mind."

Singularly enough, we have the means of judging for ourselves how far Lupus was justified in this disrespectful mention of the nascent German tongue, for the date of the letter in question corresponds almost exactly with that of a very important philological monument, one which has often been taken as a point of departure for histories of the modern European dialects, - the famous oath of Strasburg.

Certain expressions in the beginning of the letter to Immo refer it conclusively to the autumn of 841. Now Louis