Passing over many abbeys whose merits it were too long a story to enumerate, we come to S. Gall, the great Helvetian centre of thought. Originally it was founded by Gall, the disciple of Columbanus, and in the reign of King Pepin changed the Columbanian for the Benedictine rule. Already, in its early beginnings, it was a home of art, and Tutilo’s works in gold, copper, and brass were famous throughout the Germanic world. The mills, the forge, the workshops of all sorts, the cloisters for the monks, the buildings for the students, the immense tracts of arable land, the reclaimed forests, the fleet of busy little boats on the great Lake of Constance, all told of a stirring centre of human life. And while art, science, philosophy, agriculture, and mechanical industry were all at work in the townlike abbey, “you will hear these fine classical scholars preaching plain truths, in barbarous idioms, to the rude race of the mountains, who, before the monks came among them, sacrificed to the evil one, and worshipped stocks and stones.”(55) “S. Gall was almost as much a place of resort as Rome or Athens, at least to the learned world of the ninth century. Her schools were a kind of _university_, frequented by men of all nations, who came hither to fit themselves for _all professions_. S. Gall was larger and freer, and made more of the arts and sciences; indeed, so far as regards its studies, it had a better claim to the title of _university_ than any single institution which can be named as existing before the time of Philip Augustus.(56) You would have found here not monks alone, but courtiers, soldiers, and the sons of kings. All diligently applied themselves to the cultivation of the Tudesque dialect, and to its grammatical formation, so as to render it capable of producing a literature of its own.”(57) The monks were in correspondence with all the learned monastic houses of France and Italy, and the transfer of a codex, a Livy, or a Virgil from one to the other occasioned as much diplomacy, interest, and excitement as a commercial treaty or the discovery of new gold fields would in our day. S. Gall had its Greek scholars, too, and seems to have fostered among its copyists a love for “fine editions,” such as would do honor to an English or Russian bibliomaniac of to‐day. They made their own parchment from the hides of the wild animals of their mountains, and employed many hands on each precious manuscript. The costly binding was likewise all home‐made, and many a jewelled missal must have come from the hand of the artist‐monk Tutilo. Music was a specialty of S. Gall, if one may say so in an age when music was so much a part of education that alone of all the arts it was included in the _quadrivium_, or higher instruction of the mediæval schools. Romanus of S. Gall it was who first named the musical notes by the letters of the alphabet, a system which is universal in Germany, and very commonly followed in England to this day.