“I, your Flaccus, in accordance with your desire and good pleasure, am busy with ministering, under the roof of the holy Martin, to some the honey[182] of the holy Scriptures; others I seek to inebriate with the old wine of ancient disciplines; others I shall begin to nourish with the apples of grammatical subtlety; some I purpose to illumine with the order of the stars, as the painter nobly adorns the roof of the house of God. I become very many things to very many men, that I may educate very many to the profit of the holy Church of God and the honour of your imperial realm, that no grace of Almighty God in me be unemployed, and no part of thy bounty be without fruit. “But I, your poor servant, need some of the more abstruse books of scholastic learning which I had in my own land by the devoted labour of my master[183], and to some extent of myself. I say this to your excellency that you may be pleased to allow me to send some of our young men to pick out what I need, and bring to France the flowers of Britain; that not in York only there may be a garden enclosed[184], but in Tours also the scions of paradise may bear fruit; that the south wind may come and blow through the gardens by the river Loire, and the spices thereof may flow out. I take as a parable of the acquisition of wisdom the exhortation of Isaiah[185], ‘Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money[186] and without price.’ Your most noble mind knows well that there is nothing loftier that can be acquired for a happy life, nothing more joyous as an exercise, nothing stronger against vices, nothing more laudable in all dignity. As the philosophers have told us, there is nothing more necessary for the ruling of a people, no better guide of the life to the very best principles, than the glory of wisdom, the praise of discipline, the efficacy of learning. To the earnest study and daily exercise of wisdom, exhort, O king, the youths of your excellency’s palace, that they may so advance while in the bloom of youth that they may be held worthy to bring to honour their grey hairs, and by wisdom may attain to perpetual happiness. To sow the seeds of wisdom in these parts, I, so far as my poor intellect enables me, shall not be found slack. In the morning of life, in the vigour of study, I sowed in Britain; now, my blood running cold, as in the evening of life, I cease not to sow in France. To me, shattered in body, an expression of the holy Jerome, in his letter to Nepotianus, is a solace: ‘Almost all the powers of the body are changed in old men. Wisdom alone continues to increase; all the rest decrease.’ And a little further on he says, ‘The old age of those that have trained their youth in honourable arts, and have meditated in the law of God day and night, grows more learned with age, more expert with use, more wise with the process of time; it gathers