It is in works such as these (to mention no others) and not in Eginhard that the real historical significance of Charlemagne’s life-work appears. Eginhard stood too near to his hero, and had too little sense of historical perspective to realise the abiding greatness of what Charles accomplished. It is the lapse of 1100 years that has brought into increasing clearness the importance of those years which lie like a great watershed between the ancient and the mediæval world. Of him, as of most great rulers, it is true that he “builded better than he knew.” His empire soon became a tradition, his intellectual revival was eclipsed by a further plunge into the “Dark Ages,” but all that he did was not swept away. With him ends the ruin of the ancient world, and with him begins the building up of the mediæval and modern world. He did not find in Eginhard an entirely worthy biographer; but the “mannikin’s” work has received unstinted praise since the time when it was written. It was praised by a contemporary as recalling the elegance of the classical authors; its popularity during the Middle Ages is attested to by the existence of sixty manuscript copies; and a French editor has declared that we have to go on to the thirteenth century, and to Joinville’s Life of St Louis, before we find a rival in importance to Eginhard’s Life of Charlemagne. *The Monk of Saint Gall*, it seems, must remain anonymous, for the attempt to identify him with Notker rests on no better foundation than the fact, or supposition, that both stammered. And this seems to be supposition rather than fact. We are, indeed, told on good authority that Notker stammered; but the view that the Monk of Saint Gall suffered from the same defect rests only on a sentence in Chapter XVII., where he contrasts the swift, direct glance of others with his own slow and rambling narrative—“Which I have been trying to unfold, though a stammerer, and toothless” (“quæ ego _balbus et edentalus_ explicare tentavi”). It seems impossible to think that the words here must be taken in their literal sense. As the author is writing, not speaking, any defect of voice or teeth would in no way hinder his narrative: it is clear that the words are a piece of conventional and metaphorical depreciation. We know, then, nothing of the author beyond what he tells us in his narrative; and he tells us little, except that he was a German, and a monk in the Monastery of Saint Gall when Grimald and Hartmuth were abbots; that he had never himself been in Western Frankland, but had seen the Emperor Charles III. during his three days’ stay in the monastery, and at his bidding had written an account of Charles the Great, and his deeds and ways.