Among these three famous scholars, we may select Notker as the most perfect specimen of the monastic type. Like his two friends, he was a poet and musician, and his brethren considered him a second Horace for the beauty of his songs and sequences. It was the reputation of learning enjoyed by St. Gall’s which had first attracted him thither, for indeed, says Ekkehard, “he was devoured with a love of grammar.” Like a true poet, he was keenly susceptible to the sights and sounds of nature, and loved to “study her beautifulness” in that enchanted region of lakes and mountains. The gentle melancholy inseparable from exalted genius, which in him was increased by his exceeding delicacy of organisation, found its expression in the wild and mystic melodies which he composed. The monotonous sound of a mill-wheel near the abbey suggested to him the music of the “Media Vita,” the words being written whilst looking into a deep gulf over which some labourers were constructing a bridge. This antiphon became very popular in Germany, and was every year sung at St. Gall’s during the Rogation Processions. But it was not as a poet or man of science that the Blessed Notker was best known to posterity; profoundly learned in human literature, he yet, says Ekkehard, applied more to the Psalter than to any other book. Even in his own lifetime he was revered as a saint. He was master of the interior and claustral school at the same time as Ratpert governed the exterior school, and kept up the same strict discipline, “stripes only excepted.” The gentleness of his disposition peeps out in the fact that one of the faults he was hardest on in his pupils was the habit of bird’s-nesting. He was always accessible; no hour of day or night was ever deemed unseasonable for a visit from any who brought a book in their hands. For the sake of maintaining regular observance, he once forbade his disciples to whisper to him in time of silence, but the abbot enjoined him under obedience to let them speak to him whenever they would. Ratpert relates a story of him, which shows the opinion of learning and sanctity in which he was held. The emperor Charles, having on one occasion come to the monastery on a visit, he brought in his suite a certain chaplain, whose pride appears to have taken offence at the consideration with which his master treated the Blessed Notker. When they were about to depart, therefore, seeing the man of God sitting, as was his custom, with his Psalter in his hand, and recognising him to be the same man who, on the previous day, had solved many hard questions proposed to him by Charles, he said to his companions, “There is he who is said to be the most learned man in the whole empire; but if you like, I will make this most excellent wiseacre a laughing-stock for you, for I will ask him a question which, with all his learning, he will not be able to answer.” Curious to see what he would do, and how Notker would deal with him, they