[13] The reader may find more of the history of these schools in a little treatise by Launoy, De Scholis celebrioribus a Car. Mag. et post Car. Mag. instauratis; also in Hist. Litt. de la France, vols. iii. and iv.; Crevier, Hist. de l’Université de Paris, vol. i.; Brucker’s Hist. Phil. iii.; Muratori, Dissert. xliii.; Tiraboschi, iii. 158; Eichhorn, 261, 295; Heeren, and Fleury. [14] A poem by Alcuin, De Pontificibus Ecclesiæ Eboracensis, is published in Gale’s xv. Scriptores, vol. iii. Henry quotes a passage from this, describing the books at York, in which we read this line-- Acer Atistoteles, rhetor _atque_ Tullius ingens. Such a verse could not have come from Alcuin; though he errs in the quantity of syllables, where memory alone could set him right, he was not ignorant of common rules. It is found in Gale: Rhetor _quoque_ Tullius ingens. [15] Nosti quot scriptores in urbibus aut in agris Italise passim habeantur. Gerbert, Epist. 130, apud Heeren, p. 166. |The tenth century more progressive than usually supposed.| 10. The tenth century used to be reckoned by mediæval historians the darkest part of this intellectual night. It was the iron age, which they vie with one another in describing as lost in the most consummate ignorance. This, however, is much rather applicable to Italy and England, than to France and Germany. The former were both in a deplorable state of barbarism. And there are, doubtless, abundant proofs of ignorance in every part of Europe. But, compared with the seventh and eighth centuries, the tenth was an age of illumination in France. And Meiners, who judged the middle ages somewhat, perhaps, too severely, but with a penetrating and comprehensive observation, of which there had been few instances, has gone so far as to say, that “in no age, perhaps, did Germany possess more learned and virtuous churchmen of the episcopal order, than in the latter half of the tenth, and beginning of the eleventh century.”[16] Eichhorn points out indications of a more extensive acquaintance with ancient writers in several French and German ecclesiastics of this period.[17] In the eleventh century, this continued to increase; and, towards its close, we find more vigorous and extensive attempts at throwing off the yoke of barbarous ignorance, and either retrieving what had been lost of ancient learning, or supplying its place by the original powers of the mind. [16] Vergleichung der Sitten, ii. 384. The eleventh century he holds far more advanced in learning than the sixth. Books were read in the latter which no one looked at in the earlier. P. 399. [17] Allg. Gesch. ii. 335, 398. |Want of genius in the dark ages.|