“In eloquence he was copious and exuberant; whatever he wished to express he could express in the clearest manner. Nor was he content to speak only in his native tongue; he worked hard at learning foreign tongues. Latin he had learned so well that he was wont to pray in that tongue equally with his own. Greek he understood better than he spoke. He was so able in speech that he appeared as a teacher. He cultivated most studiously the liberal arts, and exceedingly respected and greatly honoured those who taught them. In learning grammar he heard the aged Peter of Pisa, a deacon. In other studies he had as his preceptor Albinus, whose cognomen was Alcuin, also a deacon, of the Saxon race, from Britain, a man most learned. With him he spent much time and labour on rhetoric and dialectic, and especially on the study of astronomy. He learned the art of computation, and with much sagacity he scrutinized most closely the courses of the stars. He made efforts, too, to become a scribe, for which purpose he used to have tablets and specimens carried about under the pillows of his bed, that he might practise his hand in writing when he had any spare time; but he did not make much way with a task begun so late in his life.” [Sidenote: Ep. 13. A.D. 789.] It would have been strange if Alcuin had not taken special interest in the spread of Christianity among the pagan races on the eastern borders of the kingdom of Karl. Our West-Saxon Boniface had made such a mark, by himself and by his Malmesbury monks Lull and Burchardt and others, and his Wimborne nuns and _magistrae_, that Alcuin found familiar names in many parts of the eastern and north-eastern fringe, and made many inquiries about the progress of the work. In one of the earliest of his letters which have been preserved, he addresses an abbat who had gone to visit the Bishop of Bremen. “Salute a thousand times my best loved bishop Uilhaed. It sorely grieves me that I have parted from him. Would that I could see him.” This was our own Northumbrian Angle Willehad, born in 730, five years before Alcuin, and no doubt his school-fellow. He had narrowly escaped martyrdom, and had bent before the storm; but he returned to the scene of his dangerous labours, and Karl caused him to be consecrated at Worms first bishop of Bremen on July 13, 787. He built his cathedral church at Bremen, and consecrated it on November 1, 789; on November 8 he died of fever at Blexen, close by. In this letter Alcuin charges the abbat— “Inform me by letter how far the Saxons fall in with your preaching, and if there is any hope of the conversion of the Danes, and if the Wilts and Vionuds[264], whom the king has recently[265] acquired, accept the faith of Christ, and what is going on in those parts, and what the lord king intends to do about the Huns[266].” In a letter to Colcu[267], in the beginning of the next year, he says:— [Sidenote: Ep. 14. A.D. 790.]