But it was as head of the Palatine school that Alcuin’s influence was chiefly to be felt in the restoration of letters. Charlemagne presented himself as his first pupil, together with the three princes, Pepin, Charles, and Louis, his sister Gisla and his daughter Richtrude, his councillors Adalard and Angilbert, and Eginhard his secretary. Such illustrious scholars soon found plenty to imitate their example, and Alcuin saw himself called on to lecture daily to a goodly crowd of bishops, nobles, and courtiers. The king wished to transform his court into a new Athens preferable to that of ancient Greece, in so far as the doctrine of Christ is to be preferred to that of Plato. All the liberal arts were to be taught there, but in such a way as that each should bear reference to religion, for this was regarded as the final end of all learning. Grammar was studied in order better to understand the Holy Scriptures and to transcribe them more correctly; music, to which much attention was given, was chiefly confined to the ecclesiastical chant; and it was principally to explain the Fathers and refute errors contrary to the faith that rhetoric and dialectics were studied. “In short,” says Crevier, “the thought both of the king and of the scholar who laboured with him was to refer all things to religion, nothing being considered as truly useful which did not bear some relation to that end.”[77] At first Alcuin allowed the study of the classic poets, and in his boyhood, as we know, he had been a greater reader of Virgil than of the Scriptures. His writings evince a perfect familiarity with the ancient poets and philosophers, whom he continually quotes, and though in his old age he discouraged his monastic pupils from following this study, it is certain that he allowed and even advocated it while presiding over the Palatine school. This appears from one of his familiar epistles to Charlemagne, in which he gives a lively picture of the labours carried on there by the students and their masters. One he describes as teaching the lectors of the royal chapel to read without misplacing their accents; another is training the boys in sacred chant; Eginhard, who is pronounced “learned in prosody,” seems to have been idling his time, but Gisla had been contemplating the stars in the silent night. “_But what crime_,” he continues, “_has harmonious Virgil committed? Is not the father of poets worthy of finding a master who shall teach the children of the palace to admire his verse?_” And he concludes with the hope that two, whom he names Thyrsis and Menalcas, may long survive to keep the cooks in order, and supply the writer with large goblets of Greek wine, and smoking dishes.