This last condition is often insisted on; nor was it until the period of the classic Renaissance that the _indiscriminate_ use of the classics by the young was tolerated. Rabanus in his book _De Institutione Clericorum_, while permitting the study of profane literature, even to clerics, stipulates that it be read for edification, and that whatever has a contrary tendency be put aside. The monastic scholars even recognised that reflection of primeval tradition which gleams through the pagan authors, and which, as Ozanam says, opened to Virgil the schools of the Middle Ages. What they did not allow was that the exclusive study of these models should be suffered to paganise the Christian mind, and they contrived, therefore, in explaining the works of Cicero or Plato to weave a Christian tone into the lessons by connecting them or comparing them with passages from the Holy Scriptures. Latin was the only language universally cultivated, though the other learned tongues were not entirely neglected. Bede and Alcuin certainly possessed a knowledge of Greek and Hebrew, and, no doubt, communicated their learning to some of their pupils. Greek, as we have seen, was studied at St. Gaul’s, and Charlemagne, who himself had some knowledge of that tongue, founded a Greek college at Osnaburgh, chiefly with a view to providing ecclesiastics whose familiarity with the language of the Eastern empire might be of service to him in his constant intercourse with Constantinople. Some writers whose aim it is to represent the learning of these centuries as altogether unworthy of notice, affect to doubt whether the Greek college, if proposed, were ever really founded; but the evidence of contemporary historians is positive on the point. “Do not wonder,” writes the chronicler of Ottberg, “that the abbot of Hermann should always have carried with him a Greek Testament, that learned man was well skilled in the Greek tongue, which he had learnt in the Caroline college at Osnaburgh, for in that foundation all the clergy were skilled in Greek as well as in Latin.” Louis the Debonnaire and Charles the Bald were both Greek scholars, and the latter monarch had a Greek and Latin glossary compiled for the use of the Church of Laon, which he would hardly have had done had there been none capable of using it. Florus, the learned deacon of the Church of Lyons, was well versed not only in Greek but Hebrew, as we learn from the following circumstance. A certain abbot, Hyldrade, sent him a Latin Psalter, begging him to correct it carefully, that it might serve as a copy for his monks to transcribe from. Among the many curious and valuable monuments of antiquity discovered by the late Cardinal Mai, is the reply of Florus to this request. From it we find that he had compared the Latin version of St. Jerome with the Septuagint, and suspecting that the text of St. Jerome had itself become corrupted by careless copying, had likewise collated it with the original Hebrew.