Equitabat Bovo per silvam frondosam Ducebat sibi Merswindem formosam. Quid stamus? Cur non imus? Through the leafy forest, Bovo went a-riding And his pretty Merswind trotted on beside him-- Why are we standing still? Why can’t we go away? Another later story still is told about a priest in Worcestershire, who was kept awake all night by the people dancing in his churchyard and singing a song with the refrain “Sweetheart have pity,” so that he could not get it out of his head, and the next morning at Mass, instead of saying “Dominus vobiscum,” he said “Sweetheart have pity,” and there was a dreadful scandal which got into a chronicle. Sometimes our Bodo did not dance himself, but listened to the songs of wandering minstrels. The priests did not at all approve of these minstrels, who (they said) would certainly go to hell for singing profane secular songs, all about the great deeds of heathen heroes of the Frankish race, instead of Christian hymns. But Bodo loved them, and so did Bodo’s betters; the Church councils had sometimes even to rebuke abbots and abbesses for listening to their songs. And the worst of it was that the great emperor himself, the good Charlemagne, loved them too. He would always listen to a minstrel, and his biographer, Einhard tells us that “He wrote out the barbarous and ancient songs, in which the acts of the kings and their wars were sung, and committed them to memory”; and one at least of those old sagas, which he liked men to write down, has been preserved on the cover of a Latin manuscript, where a monk scribbled it in his spare time. His son, Louis the Pious, was very different; he rejected the national poems, which he had learnt in his youth, and would not have them read or recited or taught; he would not allow minstrels to have justice in the law courts, and he forbade idle dances and songs and tales in public places on Sundays; but then he also dragged down his father’s kingdom into disgrace and ruin. The minstrels repaid Charlemagne for his kindness to them. They gave him everlasting fame; for all through the Middle Ages the legend of Charlemagne grew, and he shares with our King Arthur the honour of being the hero of one of the greatest romance-cycles of the Middle Ages. Every different century clad him anew in its own dress and sang new lays about him. What the monkish chronicles in their cells could never do for Charlemagne, these despised and accursed minstrels did for him; they gave him what is perhaps more desirable and more lasting than a place in history--they gave him a place in legend. It is not every emperor who rules in those realms of gold of which Keats spoke, as well as in the kingdoms of the world; and in the realms of gold Charlemagne reigns with King Arthur, and his peers joust with the Knights of the Round Table. Bodo, at any rate, benefited by Charles’s love of minstrels, and it is probable that he heard in the