some are approved and others rejected; what is condemned there is nowhere else approved, nor do men elsewhere approve of what is there condemned. Where, then, could I be more sure to find wisdom than at Rome, which is its fountain-head?”[131] About the same time Gerbert, the literary wonder of his age, arrived in Rome, where his scientific acquirements were so thoroughly appreciated by Pope John XIII. as to induce that pontiff to prevent his return into Spain; and he accordingly wrote to the emperor, advising him to secure the services of a man who was thoroughly well-versed in mathematics, and able to teach them to others. But how preposterous it seems to suppose that the mathematics of Gerbert should be thus highly valued in a city where hardly a man was to be found acquainted with the first elements of letters! Again, we find from Gerbert’s own correspondence that it was from Italy that he chiefly obtained his books. There is no city in that country, he says, where good writers and copyists are not to be found; a fact which conclusively proves that somebody was also to be found to buy what was written, for the book trade could not have been kept up without a fair supply of readers. And in the year 1000 only eight years after the above-named council had furnished Baronius with its dismal authority for proving Italy to be sunk in the grossest ignorance, we find a German noble named Wippo exhorting the emperor Henry II. to send the sons of the German nobles to be educated “after the manner of the Italians.” Not that it at all concerns us to whitewash the history of Italy in the tenth century, confessedly the very _nadir_ of her ecclesiastical annals; but there is no reason for unfairly blackening even a damaged reputation, and the united testimonies given above may at least be taken as evidence that the words of the council must not be too literally understood.