In this little _jeu-d’esprit_ we see, in the midst of its playful allusions to their familiar intercourse, what was the serious work of the Palatine scholars, and when Alcuin thus wrote he was certainly far from entertaining those severe views regarding classical studies which are generally attributed to him. It is true that at a later period he endeavoured to dissuade his disciple, Sigulf, from studying what he called, “the impure eloquence of Virgil,” telling him that the Sacred Scriptures should be enough for him. He also rebuked Rigbod, Archbishop of Mentz, for carrying Virgil in his bosom, and wished he would carry in its place the Book of the Gospels; but it is probable that most ecclesiastics would think with him that an archbishop might spend his time more profitably over the Gospels than over the Æneid. Sigulf did not certainly feel himself obliged literally to carry out the advice of his master, for in the school of Ferrières, which he afterwards governed, the Latin poets were very generally studied. He established such a classical taste among his scholars, that in the next reign we find Lupus of Ferrières correcting the works of Pliny, and sending to Rome copies of Suetonius and Quintus Curtius. It is clear, therefore, that the classics were not absolutely excluded from Alcuin’s system of education, though in the main Crevier’s account must be allowed to be correct, and gives a fair statement of the views that prevailed during the whole of the monastic period. The authors whose study Charlemagne and Alcuin desired to promote, were not so much Virgil and Cicero, as St. Jerome and St. Augustine; and Charlemagne, in his excessive admiration of those Fathers, gave utterance to the wish that he had a dozen such men at his court. The _City of God_ was read at the royal table, and the questions addressed by the court students to their master turned rather on the obscurities of Holy Writ than the difficulties of prosody. In one thing, however, they betrayed a classic taste, and that was in their selection of names. The Royal Academicians all rejoiced in some literary soubriquet; Alcuin was Flaccus; Angilbert, Homer; but Charlemagne himself adopted the more scriptural appellation of David.