"Well, Ethel dear, I will; but it's awfully ly suppressed, and then a torrent of whispered funny to see you here-and oh, such a funny words followed. figure as you are!"

Minnie relapsed into silence now, and Ethel withdrew near to the door, where she stood and listened. All was still. Down stairs there was no light and no sound. In the hall above she could see nothing, and could not tell wheth-him. She had a sharp knife ready, and with er any guards were there or not.

THE SCHOOL-MASTERS OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

TOWARD close of in the mournful com strife of princes and barons is scarcely of more

TOWARD the close of the eighth century we | upon the feudal period, it may appear that the

1

|

1

plaint of the chronicler of the age that there importance to us than the contests of kites were no schools in all the transalpine realm of and crows, and that the only object worthy of Charlemagne. But the empire of the Frankish attention is the slow progress of the indestrucruler embraced nearly the whole of Western Eu-tible mind. rope. It comprised all Germany to the borders For the first school and the most eminent of of Sclavonia, all France from Marseilles to the school-masters that break through the medieval British seas. Over this vast region, once the gloom we turn to Aix-la-Chapelle. A more seat of a gifted and progressive population, had willing pupil, a more careful instructor, can nosettled the gloom of savage ignorance. Men where be found than the savage Charles the had ceased to learn, and had sunk once more Great and his preceptor, Alcuin. Charlemagne into brutal apathy. Nor was Italy apparently had inherited the martial genius of his ancesmore fortunate. The priests of the Romish tor, Charles Martel, the diplomatic skill of his Church emulated the indolence of the laity. It father, Pepin. Huge in stature, vigorous in was difficult to find a priest who could read his mental and physical health, Teutonic in all the breviary, or a monk who could repeat his psal-highest traits of his gifted race, the first emter. The church had ceased to educate the people; the people to educate themselves.

peror of Germany bound together all Middle Europe in a magnificent unity that has formed the wonder and the envy of the long series of his successors. Charles V. vainly aspired to a similar destiny; Napoleon for a moment believed himself the modern Charlemagne; a dream of empire like that realized by the docile pupil of Alcuin still awakes the ambition of European kings. But it is chiefly as the scholar and the founder of schools that the great German must live with posterity. He found men ignorant and unwilling to learn; no schools nor colleges existed in all Germany or Gaul; the European intellect had sunk into unwonted apathy. He filled his empire with seats of learning, and left behind him a throng of accomplished scholars-a generation of poets, historians, and progressive priests.

From this dark and hopeless period of mental decay sprang up most of those political or religious superstitions that still embarrass the progressive intellect of nations. The Oriental theory of caste was impressed upon the institutions of Europe. The working-classes sank into slavery; the military caste ruled with despotic power. The Roman conception of personal independence and of self-respect, which had been illustrated in a long succession of vigorous political contests, was lost in Gothic barbarism; the champions of popular freedom who had sustained the cause of the people in the Forum or the Campus Martius found no successors in the night of medieval ignorance; their place was supplied by indolent barons and savage kings. The hapless serfs clustered Yet it is possible that it was to his famous around the castles of their robber lords, and school-master that Charlemagne owed his ruling learned to kiss the hand that alternately plun-ideas, his love for letters, his plan of reviving dered and protected them. in all its ancient grandeur the empire of AuTo rescue mankind from ignorance and deg-gustus or the Antonines. Alcuin was an Enradation, to plant the seeds of progress in the ungenial soil of feudalism, was the almost hopeless aim of a band of gifted men-the schoolmasters of the Middle Ages. Yet history has seldom paused in its passion for martial glory to notice their labors, their self-denial, or their final success. Their names are almost lost amidst a throng of barbarous kings and chivalric conquerors. The true benefactors of their race are almost forgotten, and few have cared to remember that Alcuin was greater than Charlemagne, or Erigena than Coeur de Lion; that he who founded a school or spread the germs of knowledge was more useful to mankind than the most renowned crusader or the most imperious of popes or kings. It is not impossible that all this may yet be changed; that, as the light of history falls more vividly

1 Ante ipsum dominum Carolum regem in Galliâ nullum fuit studium liberalium artium. Perhaps an exaggerated statement.

At

glishman, and had been the provost, or head
teacher, of a flourishing school at York. En-
gland still retained some traces of Roman civ-
ilization, and Ireland, and perhaps Scotland,
possessed scholars who had not yet sunk be-
neath the advancing barbarism of the age.
York Alcuin had learned and imparted a degree
of classical knowledge that made him famous
among his contemporaries. Covered with re-
nown, he had wandered away to Italy. Here
he met Charlemagne, and was tempted by the
liberal offers of the eager king to accompany
him to Germany. He became the centre of a
busy throng of teachers, scholars, and half-sav-
age pupils, the rector of a royal university, that
was perhaps imitated at a later period in Paris,
Oxford, and Prague.

The most industrious of all Alcuin's pupils

1 Haureau, Charlemagne et sa Cour, has produced a brief and pleasant narrative. See Eginhard, Vita Caroli Imp. 2 Eginhard, c. xxxiii.

was Charlemagne.' Master of Europe, engaged | tion, instead of learning to write a fair round in endless wars and ceaseless labors, the ruler hand or studying the seven branches of knowlupon whose prudence and valor hung the des- edge. Charlemagne, when the examination tiny of mankind-the half-savage emperor never was over, turned with a gracious smile to the paused in his effort to civilize himself. He industrious children of the poor. "You have was all his life the most diligent of students. done well," he cried, "and deserved my favor. He heard lectures on grammar, rhetoric, phi- For you I design the richest abbeys and the losophy. He labored, perhaps in vain, to ac- fairest offices of my kingdom." He next turnquire the art of writing, and every night his ed to the children of the nobles. His majestic tablets and his stylus were placed at his bed- form was erect with indignation, his terrible side and employed his hours of wakefulness; he eyes flashed out rage and contempt. "But learned to read and dictate Latin readily, and for you," he exclaimed, "unworthy offspring knew something of Greek; he commented on of my court, you have wasted your time in the Scriptures, and wrote vigorous essays against follies and effeminacy, and disobeyed my eximage-worship; and his eager intellect strove press commands. By Heaven, unless you change to grasp the whole field of knowledge that lay your conduct, you shall receive no promotion open to the scholars of his age. In every town from me!"" It is plain that in the colleges and every monastery he planted a free school, founded by Charlemagne no one obtained a and, taught perhaps by the generous example degree unless he deserved it. of his friend Haroun-al-Raschid, strove to cultivate letters and educate his people.

2

On the borders of Germany and Gaul arose the fair city of Aix-la-Chapelle, the chief capi

In the earlier period of his reign, it is relat-tal and the favorite residence of the new Augused, two school-masters from Ireland appeared on the borders of Gaul-men of incomparable skill in letters. They landed in company with some British merchants, but the only wares they had to dispose of were the products of the school. Daily they cried out to the ignorant people, "Whoever desires wisdom, let him come to us and buy." But no purchaser came forward. The natives looked upon them with stupid wonder, and at last, as they persisted in their vain attempt, began to think them mad. No one cared to purchase wisdom; no one knew what learning was. The strange conduct of the Irish teachers was told to Charlemagne, and he sent for them to visit his court.

"Have you," he cried, "learning to sell ?" "We have it," they replied, "for those who receive it worthily."

They were at once entertained with high favor in the family of the king, and were endowed with a liberal support. One of them, Clement, opened a school, at which great numbers of the young nobility, as well as of the poorer classes, attended. It was no doubt a free school under the especial care of the king. Charlemagne went off to his Saxon wars, and after a long interval returned. Almost his first care was to examine into the progress of his favorite scholars. Noble and plebeian, rich or poor, they were all assembled in the presence of the king, who proceeded to inquire into their attainments. He found that the poorer pupils had been singularly industrious, and Clement was able to speak with pleasure of their diligence and zeal. But the children of the nobility had neglected all their advantages. They had passed their time in arranging their hair and putting on fine clothes, in sport and dissipa

1 Annal. Carol. Mag., a poetical narrative. Horum doctores magnifice coluit, p. 73.

2 Alcuin, Migne, Pat., 100, p. 51. Charles calls Alcuin Clarissimi in Christo præceptoris. Epist. 124, p. 50. The argument against images unites ridicule with reason. See Migne, vol. 98.

tus. Here he had built a church of rare splendor, adorned with pillars of marble ravished from the cities of Italy, and gleaming with profuse ornaments of gems and gold. No images were adored in the cathedral of the iconoclastic emperor; but its heavy arches resounded with the plain Gregorian chants, intoned by singers who had been cultivated with assiduous care, and who were sometimes led in their musical services by Charlemagne himself. A few fragments are still shown of the rude architecture of the ninth century-the substructions of the Church of St. Mary. Here, too, was his favorite palace, where, surrounded by his sons and daughters, his authors and school-masters, he abandoned himself to his studies, and endeavored to inculcate democratic simplicity in the rude minds of his German subjects. Yet the palace at Aix was a magnificent attempt to revive the luxury and the grandeur of imperial Rome. Its mosaic floors and marble columns; its halls and corridors, adorned by the most skillful artists; its furniture of gold and silver; its costly hangings; its decorations, gathered from the farthest limits of the world; its water-clock, the gift of the magnificent Haroun-al-Raschid; and an immense elephant, the offering of the same bountiful hand, are dwelt upon by the annalists as among the wonders of the age. In his domestic affairs Charlemagne does not seem to have been fortunate. From his first wife he was separated in anger. Four others succeeded. The German Fastrade followed the Suevic Hildegarde. Both died, and he married Luitgarde. He was once more a widower; and nine wives in all are said to have won the affections of the Henry VIII. of the Middle Ages. Yet his palace was filled with a fair array of sons and daughters; and the latter, at least, seem to have inherited the literary taste of

their studious father.

1 Michelet, Hist. Fran., i. The legend is rather illustrative than trustworthy. Haureau, 194.

and taught princes and nobles the elements of learning. He stood almost alone in that dark and dreadful period, the assertor of the dignity of the intellect. Around him existed a corruption of manners of which the modern can scarcely conceive, a tendency to mental decay

Alcuin presided over the studies of the palace, | Alcuin, an Irishman or a Scot, the famous and within its gilded halls was formed a litera-teacher came to the court of Charles the Bald, ry club-one of the most fruitful that has ever existed. Each member bore an assumed name, indicative of his peculiar tastes. Alcuin, who wrote bad verses and was an inferior poet, was known as Flaccus or Horatius; the emperor took the name of David; the poetical young Engilbert was Homer; and each of the school-which even his wonderful powers were incapable masters, princes, or princesses who made up the of arresting.' Yet tradition rather than hisprogressive circle was known to the associates tory attests the vigor of his intellectual strugonly by a classical or biblical title. They cor- gle. He evidently delayed for a moment the responded and composed, disputed, taught, and final fall of the intellect. He was theologian read each other's verses; they united in gather- and philosopher, poet, heretic, and wit. He ing up the early songs of the Germans, and had traveled in distant lands, and by a strange perhaps saved the Nibelungenlied. Love some- anachronism was said to have studied at Athens. times shot his arrows among the docile schol- With the King of France he lived in close ars, and the impassioned Engilbert won the friendship for many years, and wrote at his heart of Princess Bertha, and they were mar-suggestion his most important works. He ried amidst the general applause of the whole gave jest for jest to his royal patron, and smiled school. Yet for literary activity the club of as a philosopher at the barbarism of his master. Aix-la-Chapelle may well be envied by many Once they sat together at table. "What is the of its modern rivals. A hundred authors sprang distance," said the merry king, over his flowing up in the reign of Charlemagne. Alcuin pro- cups, "between a sot and a Scot?" "Only this duced profusely letters, poems, hymns, and dis- table," replied the ready wit. Here Erigena sertations; Eginhard, a favorite scholar, wrote composed his laborious productions—a translauseful histories and a vivid life of his royal tion of Dionysius the Areopagite, a work on friend; Engilbert composed spirited verses; predestination, and a metaphysical treatise on Paul the Deacon left behind him grammatical Nature. Unhappily for the teacher, he assailed works that still exist. Even the princesses the doctrine of transubstantiation, and was a were agreeable writers; and Charles himself skeptic as to the infallibility of the pope. The composed a German grammar that served to monks pursued him with bitter reproaches; the preserve the purity of the Gothic tongue. In pope strove to bind him to the stake. He fled from fine, Charlemagne, who had begun his reign France to Oxford, and was professor in the colwithout a school or a school-master in all his lege said to have been founded by Alfred. But barbarous realm, saw before he died a wide he was soon driven from his professorship, and system of free education spring up in Gaul or next opened a school at Malmesbury, where his Germany, and planted in the heart of Europe scholars, enraged at his severe discipline, are the germs of modern civilization. said to have put him to death by stabbing him with their iron pens; or, as others state, he fell a victim to the hatred of the monks.

2

Few of the particulars of his life have any historical value, and so barbarous was the age that no one cared to give an account of its greatest scholar. He lives only in his writings : a bold and powerful genius that cast aside the superstitions of his contemporaries; that scoffed at the follies of feudalism and chivalry; that sounded, amidst the coarse revelries and cruel wars of knights and kings, the praises of intellectual supremacy. Had the voice of the gifted school-master been heard with attention, the

At length, in 814, the emperor died, and night once more settled upon the advancing mind. Wars, crusades, savage barons, and feudal violence overspread the fair fields of Germany. One by one the authors and the school-masters who had nearly conquered Europe passed away; books were forgotten, teachers despised. The feudal system began its war against the intellect, and robber castles and brutal chiefs took the place of the school-house and the busy school. Ignorance became the insignia of noble birth, and princes and barons had long ceased to read or write. The tenth and eleventh centuries are noted for a wide in-world might have been reformed, and the school tellectual decay, and for the terrible woes that fell upon the working-classes. It is knowledge alone that can elevate the people.

and the college have saved mankind centuries of woe. But he fell in the vain struggle, the martyr of science.

Men now grew so degraded that the schoolmaster was looked upon as a magician, and he who studied the sciences was usually burned for a witch. Yet Europe had no excuse for its barbarism, for a line of intellectual light had been

See Erigena, J. Scotus, Leben und Lehre: T. Christlieb, 1860. A careful study of the great intellect. 2 Der Aufenthalt in Frankreich (Leben und Lehre, p. 24), am Hofe Carle's des Kahlen, etc. Galliæ transmisit Hibernia, says Prudentius.

VOL. XLIII.-No. 256.-36

fidels he had learned their magical arts, and had made a compact with Satan.' Gerbert had begged from the fiend perpetual life. He had been promised that he should never die until he should celebrate mass in the church of Jerusalem. Confident of immortality, he now resolved never to visit the Holy City; but one day the pope happened to perform mass in the Church of the Holy Cross, forgetting that it was also called the Church of Jerusalem. The fiend seized the opportunity, and, snatching a golden candlestick from the altar, struck the schoolmaster a mortal blow. Gerbert died, and was buried in a stately tomb; but for six centuries afterward his bones were heard to rattle in his coffin, and strange and inexplicable sounds were ever haunting the last resting-place of the papal magician. They only ceased when, in the seventeenth century, the tomb was opened. For a moment its inmate was seen lying perfect as if alive, and then disappeared forever in a wild burst of satanic flames.

traced along the shores of the Mediterranean, | hours at Cordova and among the polished inand the gifted Arabs from Bagdad to Cordova had filled Persia, Africa, and Spain with brilliant centres of mental progress.1 From the ninth to the twelfth centuries the schools and colleges of the cultivated Saracens gave forth a constant succession of poets, philosophers, men of science, and men of thought. Vast throngs of students filled the universities of Bagdad or Cordova, and the speculations of Rome or Alexandria inspired the keen intellects of the followers of Mohammed. While all Christendom bowed before graven images, and forgot the teachings of its ancient faith, the smallest towns of Africa had their free schools; and the virtues that Mohammed had borrowed from Christianity were inculcated in the mosques of Cairo or Algiers. Learning had fled from the cold North to find its home in the burning South; and the children of the desert, educated to the highest pitch of civilization, looked with generous scorn from their fair cities, their smiling gardens, and their cultivated homes upon the coarse revelries of the baronial castle and the savage manners of the feudal courts.

To the Arabs Gerbert, the next great schoolmaster-the witch, the sorcerer, the terror of his contemporaries-probably owed his mental training. He was confidently believed by many to have dealings with the Evil One; and when he ascended the papal chair and became head of the church, cardinals and priests shrank from him in horror, and asserted that Satan had succeeded in placing one of his own imps in the hallowed seat of St. Peter. He was born in poverty and obscurity, but a kind patron had taken him from his native Auvergne, and educated him in Spain. He had perhaps studied at the magnificent University of Cordova, and had learned from the Arabs, then in the splendor of their renown, the deepest secrets of their science and the wonders of algebra and geometry. Gerbert, enriched with Arabic learning, came back to France and taught school for many years at Rheims. His genius soon won attention; he became the chief school-master of his age, and had formed a close intimacy with the royal family that sat on the imperial throne. He was the friend, too, of Hugh Capet, the founder of the new dynasty of France; and through various fortunes, often persecuted and ever scoffing at the ignorance or venality of Rome, the gifted teacher lived on a studious career; now shunned as a heretic or a witch, now raised by his friend Otho III. to the papal chair, Gerbert seems to have stirred the minds of his contemporaries with a strange impulse that startled and amazed.

The wildest stories were told of his early career; and it was believed that in his studious

1 Renan describes the literary condition of Cordova under Hakem. Averroes, chap. i. Averroes ruled in the University of Padua, chap. iii.

2 Migne, Pat., vol. 189, p. 56. Patria Aquitanus, humill gente natus, etc.

It was the year 1000, an epoch of singular interest, when the great scholar, the wisest and purest of his countrymen, sat in the chair of St. Peter. In that year the majority of Christians had believed that the world was to dissolve in fiery convulsions. The heavens were to roll away; the judgment-day was near at hand. A general consternation hung over Europe as the last years of the century passed on; and amidst the universal barbarism and decay every shrine was thronged with eager penitents, and all Germany and France, struck with a sudden dread, bowed assiduously before their images, and invoked the pity of Mary and the saints. From his papal throne the acute Gerbert, now Pope Sylvester II., must have watchcd with compassionate skepticism the folly of his contemporaries, and have inspired with his own hopefulness his patron the Emperor Otho. It is said that the intelligent school-master aided in dispelling the gloom that rested upon the European intellect; that he introduced into the schools of his country the sciences taught at Cordova; that he brought into use the Arabic numerals; that he taught algebra and geometry; that his vigorous mind awoke anew the taste for letters that had died with Charlemagne. His influence, indeed, can scarcely have been small. He ruled the emperors of Germany, and possibly guided the taste of the new dynasty of France. But with his death barbarism once more returned, and men learned to look upon their intellectual leader as an emissary from the infernal world.3

A century rolled away, and about the year 1100 a fair and graceful young man, gifted with marvelous eloquence, and adorned with every

Ipsum Hispali artes magicas et necromantiam didicisse, 139, p. 56.

2 Milman, Lat. Christ., ii. p. 487. Cormenin, Lives of Popes, p. 321.

3 Homagium diabolo fecit. His health seerns to have been feeble. See Epist. 210.