His grandson, Otho III., who succeeded to the crown in 983, was also a scholar, and a pupil of Gerbert’s, and surnamed the Wonder of the World. At his death the crown passed to his cousin, St. Henry of Bavaria, whose brother-in-law, St. Stephen of Hungary, converted his people to Christianity, and changed those wild barbarians, so long the scourge of Europe, into a civilised and Christian nation. Thus, for the space of a century, Germany was blessed with a succession of great Christian rulers, who, if they had some defects, were yet on the whole protectors of religion, and encouragers of learned men. Italy, indeed, is represented by most historians as presenting during the same period a scene of lamentable decay; and Tiraboschi gives the names of only two bishops as possessing any pretensions to learning, namely, Atto of Vercelli, and Ratherius of Verona. But allowance must be made for the exaggerations of party-writers, and there are facts which cannot be altogether reconciled with their sweeping statements. Studies were certainly carried on in the monasteries that escaped the rage of the Saracens, and Muratori cites a long catalogue of books, all either copied or collected at Bobbio during the tenth century. Baronius, whose strictures on the state of Italy are exceedingly severe, quotes the acts of a council held at Rheims in 992, wherein it is declared that there was scarcely one person to be found at that time in Rome who knew the first elements of learning. Considering the unhappy and scandalous factions which then held sway in the Roman capital, no picture of social disorder would seem too black for us to credit; yet bad as things were, one is staggered at the notion that no one in the city of the Popes and the Cæsars should know even how to read. A few years previously to the date assigned, Rome, as we shall see, not only possessed good masters herself, but supplied them to the German seminaries; nor is there any reason for supposing that her political disasters necessarily closed her schools. If, from the acts of a remote council, we turn to the writings of one thoroughly conversant with the state of Italy, the man of his age best qualified to judge of any matter connected with learning--I mean the famous Ratherius of Verona--we shall find a very different description of the state of things which he had witnessed with his own eyes. His testimony is the more remarkable from the fact that he was the great censor of his age, sparing neither clergy nor bishops in his caustic attacks. Yet he assures us that in his time, and he died in 974, there was no place where a man could get better instructed in sacred letters than in Rome. “What is taught elsewhere on ecclesiastical dogma,” he says, “that is unknown there? It is there that we find the sovereign doctors of the whole world; it is there that the most illustrious princes of the Church have flourished. There the decrees of the pontiffs are to be found; there the canons are examined; there