Ratgar was a tyrant; there was no doubt of that. The only question was how long this tyranny would survive the loss of students and the defection of the monks, who had already begun to complain and resist. There was not any hope, however, that this line of conduct would be materially altered, and here again we have verses of Rabanus, lamenting in moving terms the loss of scholars and the demoralization of the school. It is not at all unlikely that the praises of the Holy Cross were the solace of the poor pedagogue who had lost his favorite volumes. He could scarcely otherwise have found the leisure for this elegant trifling. The poem just mentioned is imperfect. It breaks off abruptly and the conclusion is missing. What it may have had to do with the outcome of Ratgar’s tyranny we therefore cannot say, but the times upon which the monastery had fallen were very grievous; and in 807 there was a pestilence which depleted the list of monks from four hundred down to one hundred and fifty, and these must, of course, have been more pressed by the manual labor than ever. They toiled as did Israel in bondage, and yet the end had not come. It was a period of the worst sort of misrule, paralleled later at Cluny and not unknown in other conventual establishments. In 814 Rabanus was ordained priest on December 23d, and, as is supposed, after his withdrawal for a time from the monastery to the refuge offered by a friend’s house. From a passage in one of his commentaries it has been inferred that he used this suspense of his labors to make a journey to Palestine. In 811 there was, says Dahl, a great confusion (_Verwirrung_) in the cloister. A libel was sent to Charles the Great criticising the conduct of Ratgar—“libel” being used in its old sense of “little treatise.” Nothing, as it would seem, was done about this, although the ordination of Rabanus may have been a link in the chain. But when Ludwig the Pious (Ludwig der Fromme) came to the kingdom Ratgar was summarily deposed, and Egil, a kindly, book-loving man, created abbot in his stead. This occurred in 817, three years after Ludwig began to reign. All difficulties were now over. The school was reopened with greater prosperity than before. The library was increased. The secular scholars were taught outside the walls, for the number of students surpassed the accommodation. And, in a word, Ratgar had merely held back a constantly augmenting torrent which now poured itself in in an intrepid tide. When Martin Luther, centuries later, cries out for intelligent instruction and for the extension of the school system of Germany, he is but repeating the cry which swelled in the ears of Ratgar and drove him before it with execration from his abbacy.