figmenta sive deliramenta_ (the fictions or mad ravings of Pagan poets) are commonly employed by Christian authors of the Lives of Saints, in order to mark the inferiority of Virgil and Ovid to their own more edifying compositions. Relying on their spiritual pretensions, the monkish scribes gloried in ignorance and paraded want of grammar as a sign of grace. 'I warn the curious reader,' writes a certain Wolfhard in the 'Life of S. Walpurgis,' 'not to mind the mass of barbarisms in this little work; I bid him ponder what he finds upon these pages, and seek the pearl within the dung-heap.' Gregory the Great goes further, and defies the pedantry of pedagogues. 'The place of prepositions and the cases of the nouns I utterly despise, since I deem it unfit to confine the words of the celestial oracle within the rules of Donatus.' 'Let philosophers and impure scholars of Donatus,' writes a fanatic of Cordova, 'ply their windy problems with the barking of dogs, the grunting of swine, snarling with skinned throat and teeth; let the foaming and bespittled grammarians belch, while we remain evangelical servants of Christ, true followers of rustic teachers.' Thus the opposition of the Church to Paganism, the conviction that Christianity was alien to culture, and the absorption of intellectual interest in theological questions contributed to destroy what had remained of sound scholarship in the last years of the Empire. The task of the Church, moreover, in the Middle Ages was not so much to keep learning alive as to moralise the savage races who held Europe at their pleasure. Pure Latinity, even if it could have been instilled into the nations of the North, was of less moment than elementary discipline in manners and religion. It must not be forgotten that the literature of ancient Rome was artificial in its best days, confined to a select few, and dependent on the capital for its support. After the dismemberment of the Empire the whole of Europe was thrown open to the action of spiritual powers who had to use unlettered barbarians for their ministers and missionaries. To submit this vast field to classic culture at the same time that Christianity was being propagated, would have been beyond the strength of the Church, even had she chosen to undertake this task, and had the vital forces of antiquity not been exhausted. [Footnote 12: For the low state of criticism, even in a good age, see Aulus Gellius, lib. xiv. cap. vi. He describes the lecture of a rhetor, _quispiam linguæ Latinæ literator_, on a passage in the seventh Æneid. The man's explanation of the word _bidentes_ proves an almost more than mediæval puerility and ignorance.] [Footnote 13: Most of the following quotations will be found in Comparetti, _Virgilio nel Medio Evo_, vol. i., a work of sound scholarship and refined taste upon the place of Virgil in the Middle Ages.]