In 822, when Egil died, by common consent Rabanus was invested with the dignity of abbot. For a time things went smoothly enough, and such scholars as Walafrid Strabo, Servatus Lupus, and Otfried of Weissenberg were the glory of the Fulda schools. But the pendulum swung too far in the rebound from Ratgar’s illiterate policy. The monks were kept at writing and teaching with too little discrimination as to their tastes and capacities. They began to grumble that the material interests of the monastery were neglected, and that Fulda might be growing rich in books and in bookworms, but was in danger of becoming poor in everything else. The disaffection found a support in Archbishop Otgar of Mainz, a busy political prelate, who seems to have become jealous of the prominence of Rabanus. As a supporter of Lothar and of the policy of imperial unity, he was in politics on the other side from Rabanus. Our abbot was a Nationalist and a Home Ruler. He wished to foster the cultivation of the German tongue and to maintain the distinctness of the German nation. He had stood by poor, weak Ludwig the Pious, whose sorrow it was to have succeeded to the work of Charles the Great. He addressed to him a letter of consolation in his troubles, and wrote a treatise: _De Reverentia Filiorum erga Patres et Subditorum erga Reges_, to recall his unfilial children to a sense of their duty. In Ludwig the German he recognized the most dutiful of the three. So when the Emperor Ludwig died in 840, he supported the younger Ludwig in the demand for virtual German independence against the high-handed imperialism of his elder brother Lothar. He thus shared in the triumph of the victory at Fontanetum, followed by the Compact of Verdun (843), which practically put an end to Karling imperialism, and secured the national independence of France and Germany. But in the mean time Otgar enabled the illiterate party at Fulda to drive Rabanus into exile, and when he came back he found the brethren had chosen another abbot, Hatto, in his stead. Waiving his own rights, and laying aside all grudges, he betook himself to his books in a priory or something of the sort on Mount St. Peter, not far off, and resumed the work of teaching. Here he is thought to have composed his great philosophical treatise on the All, which marks a distinct advance in the development of mediaeval metaphysics and logic. Indeed, there was but one thinker of the ninth century who surpassed him in penetration and learning—the wonderful Irish monk, John Scotus Erigena, who wrote Latin but thought in Greek and was filled with all the wisdom of the Hellenes, from Plato to Dionysius the Areopagite.