century, and remained there until his seventeenth year, when he was summoned home by his father to be introduced at court and to commence his military career--a career, be it remembered, into which the aspirant to chivalry in the twelfth century would have been initiated at seven. He afterwards embraced the religious state, and did much to improve the studies in his monastery of Jumièges. Then there were the episcopal schools, in which the learning given was far from being superficial. St. Gregory of Tours tells us that when King Guntram entered Orleans in 540 he was met by a band of scholars from the bishop’s school, who welcomed him in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac verses of their own composition. St. Gregory had himself received his education in the episcopal schools of Clermont and Vienne, and informs us that even ecclesiastical students, before entering on their sacred studies, went through a course of the seven liberal arts, together with one of poetry and the Cantus.[72] M. Guizot gives a list of the principal monastic and episcopal schools of which a distant notice is to be found in the histories of the seventh century. Twenty of them are in Neustria alone, and their multiplication forms the subject of repeated decrees of provincial councils. We need not, however, dwell on their history more particularly, for whatever may have been their number or their excellence, it is certain that before the accession of Charlemagne, the Gallican schools had fallen into general decay. The decline was progressive, but it ended in something like total extinction. “At the end of the fourth century,” says M. Guizot, “profane and sacred literature flourished side by side: pagan letters were indeed dying, but they were not entirely dead. They soon, however, disappeared, and sacred literature alone was cultivated. But if we go on a little further, we find that the cultivation of Christian literature has itself vanished,”[73]--the decay had, in fact, become universal.