Leaving the manner of that ancient school life for the present, we are struck with astonishment at the broad and liberal tone of the instruction. Rabanus followed Bede in providing an encyclopaedia of human knowledge for his pupils. He entitled it _De Universis_ and based it on the previous work of Isidore of Seville. Additionally he abridged the grammar of Priscian, a treatise which furnished, even as late as the days of Richard Braythwaite and his _Drunken Barnabee_, the suggestive line, “Fregi frontem Prisciani.” “I’ve broke Priscian’s forehead mainly.” He also furnished a text-book in arithmetic, drawn mostly from Boethius, and an etymology in which he depends to some extent on Isidore. He utilized Bede for chronology, and Gregory for ecclesiastical forms, and Augustine for doctrine, and Cassiodorus for commentary and exegesis. Moreover, he was free from much of the superstition of his age. He objected to giving the liver of a mad dog to one who had been bitten by it—that being then held a perfect cure. His letters show an independent and almost an audacious mind. In all religious discussion his motto was, “When the cause is Christ’s, the opposition of the bad counts for naught.” In statecraft—for ecclesiastics were chief movers in these affairs—he held with Ludwig the Pious. He wrote a great deal in the way of Scripture commentary, and his intellect was of a mystical order. He delighted in allegories, in enshrining the bones of saints and confessors, and in making the most marvellous and intricate anagrams and arrangements of verses and letters upon the subject of the Holy Cross, whose praise he has elaborately set forth. Wimpfeling may well style this production a “wonderful and highly elaborate work.” It dates from the year 815, and no modern reader can view it without dismay at its enormous expenditure of labor. A man like this in the teacher’s seat of Fulda would not be long in obscuring by his manifest talents the feebler light of his abbot. So Ratgar found, and devoted himself and his monks with mistimed zeal to the erection of a great addition to the cloister church. He grudged the time given to the studies of the school. He would much prefer to have had the full control of all that was passing in the cloisters, but this was plainly impossible. So he devised a very satisfactory way of interrupting the success of Rabanus. He took the books from the scholars and he even forbade them to the teacher. This was the cause of some pathetic verses in which Rabanus sets forth his petition for their return. “Let thy clemency,” he exclaims, “concede me books, for the poverty of knowledge suffocates me.” One grates his teeth in reading farther on the words, “Whether you do this or not, yet let the divine power of the Omnipotent always afford you all good things and complete a good fight with an honest course, that you may ever be with Christ in the height of heaven.”