Nor, whilst noticing these evidences of a love of letters, surviving even in the period of decay, must I neglect to mention that notable academy of Toulouse, which at one time did its best to involve all Europe in a fog of learned perplexity. Its eccentricities would scarcely merit to be recorded, had they not left very distinct traces both in the Irish and Anglo-Saxon literature. The history of this academy has been written by one of its members, the false Virgil, as he is called, who has contrived to mystify both the date and whereabouts of its foundation. It is presumed, however, to have flourished at Toulouse sometime in the sixth century. Holding to the principle that pearls must not be cast before swine, certain enthusiasts of Aquitaine formed among themselves a secret scholastic society, the members of which spoke a language understood only by the initiated, and conferred on men and places the nomenclature of ancient Greece and Rome. The grand, I might almost say the exclusive, study of these illuminati was grammar. An assembly of thirty of their number had gravely determined that the subject most worthy of a wise man’s meditation was the conjugation of the Latin verb, and on this momentous theme they split into two sects, which rivalled Guelph and Ghibelline in the ardour of their mutual animosities. The heads of these two parties, whose academic names were Terence and Galbungus, spent fourteen days and nights discussing the question whether the pronoun _Ego_ had a vocative case: at last the difficulty was referred to Eneas, who decided that it might be allowed to possess one when employed in the interrogative phrase. These grammatical debates took place when Virgil was but a youth, but in his riper years he thoroughly maintained the reputation of his masters. It was the exact government of words which left him no repose, and he tells us how one night, having retired to rest, he was awaked by a knocking at his door, and found that the disturbance was caused by the arrival of a certain Spanish grammarian, named Mitterius, whom he honoured neither more nor less than if he had been a prophet of God. Mitterius begged for a night’s lodging, promising in return to answer any question which his entertainer might put to him. The opportunity was not to be lost; there was but one thing just then that Virgil desired to know, and, springing from his bed, he at once required, as the price of his hospitality, a direct rule by which he could determine when the word _hic_ was an adverb and when it was a pronoun. These anecdotes, however, give us but a faint notion of the labours of the Toulouse grammarians. The difficulties of the Latin syntax were not sufficient to satisfy their thirst for obscurity, and they therefore expended their ingenuity on inventing new means of perplexing their own brains and those of their scholars. “Was it to be supposed,” they asked, “that this noble tongue was so poor and barren, that its