Every variety of useful occupation was embraced by the monks; while some were at work hewing down the old forest which a few years before had given shelter to the mysteries of Pagan worship, or tilling the soil on those numerous farms which to this day perpetuate the memory of the great abbey in the names of the towns and villages which have sprung up on their site,[91] other kinds of industry were kept up within doors, where the visitor might have beheld a huge range of workshops in which cunning hands were kept constantly busy on every description of useful and ornamental work in wood, stone, and metal. It was a scene, not of artistic _dilettanteism_, but of earnest, honest labour, and the treasurer of the abbey was charged to take care that the sculptors, engravers, and carvers in wood, were always furnished with plenty to do. Passing on to the interior of the building the stranger would have been introduced to the scriptorium, over the door of which was an inscription warning the copyists to abstain from idle words, to be diligent in copying good books, and to take care not to alter the text by careless mistakes. Twelve monks always sat here employed in the labour of transcription, as was also the custom at Hirsauge, a colony sent out from Fulda in 830; and the huge library which was thus gradually formed, survived till the beginning of the seventeenth century, when it was destroyed in the troubles of the thirty years’ war. Not far from the scriptorium was the interior school, where the studies were carried on with an ardour and a largeness of views, which might have been little expected from an academy of the ninth century. Our visitor, were he from the more civilised south, might well have stood in mute surprise in the midst of these fancied barbarians, whom he would have found engaged in pursuits not unworthy of the schools of Rome. The monk Probus is perhaps lecturing on Virgil and Cicero, and that with such hearty enthusiasm that his brother professors accuse him, in good-natured jesting, of ranking them with the saints. Elsewhere disputations are being carried on over the Categories of Aristotle, and an attentive ear will discover that the controversy which made such a noise in the twelfth century, and divided the philosophers of Europe into the rival sects of the Nominalists and Realists, is perfectly well understood at Fulda, though it does not seem to have disturbed the peace of the school. To your delight, if you be not altogether wedded to the dead languages, you may find some engaged on the uncouth language of their father-land, and, looking over their shoulders, you may smile to see the barbarous words which they are cataloguing in their glossaries; words, nevertheless, destined to reappear centuries hence in the most philosophic literature of Europe. The monks of Fulda derive their scholastic traditions from Alcuin and Bede, and cannot, therefore, neglect a study of the vernacular. Yet they are,