Our materials for the great siege are fairly abundant. Several of the contemporary chronicles, in describing this gallant struggle, throw off somewhat of their usual meagreness, and give an account conceived with an unusual degree of spirit and carried out with an unusual amount of detail.[77] And we have a yet more minute account, which, even as it is, is of considerable value, and which, had it been a few degrees less wearisome and unintelligible, would have been of the highest interest. Abbo, a distinguished churchman of those times, a monk of the house of Saint German, and not only a contemporary, but a spectator and sharer in the defence,[78] conceived the happy idea of writing a minute narrative of the exciting scenes which he had witnessed. But he unhappily threw his tale into the shape of hexameters which have few rivals for affectation and obscurity. The political biographer of Lewis the Pious at all events writes Latin; Abbo writes in a Babylonish dialect of his own composing, stuffed full of Greek and other out-of-the-way words, and to parts of which he himself found it needful to attach a glossary. Still with all this needless darkness, he gives us many details, and he especially preserves many individual names which we should not find out from the annalists. A fervent votary of Saint German, a loyal citizen of Paris, a no less loyal subject of the valiant Count who, when he wrote, had grown into a King, Abbo had every advantage which personal knowledge and local interest could give to a narrator of the struggle. Only we cannot help wishing that he had stooped to tell his tale, if not in his native tongue, whether Romance or Teutonic, yet at least in the intelligible Latin of Nithard in a past generation and of Richer in a future one.[79]