In the life of Notker, written by Ekkehard (Eckhardt) the Younger, who was Dean of St. Gall in 1220, we have a perfect mine of garrulous gossip and of chattering, pleasant romance. It has been called “one of the most delightful of mediaeval memoirs;” though we are very little disposed to accept a large share of it as solid fact. There is in it much confusion, both of dates and names. From one of its stories came the designation of Charles the Great (“the Emperor Charles”) as the author of the _Veni Creator_, a point which we have treated more fully in the chapter upon Rabanus Maurus. The copyist is mainly accountable for these blunders, some of which are so grossly anachronistic as to be at once corrected by their reader; and others are so puerile that no one can easily be deceived. Since it is to Notker that we owe the “sequence” in its full development, it may be as well for us to let Ekkehard sketch his character at full length. The biography is in one of the April volumes of the _Acta Sanctorum_ of the Bollandist Fathers—a great white-covered folio which displays the immense research of its editors. For those who are less inclined to the Latin language in its monkish form, there is the admirable abridgment by Baring-Gould, known as the _Lives of the Saints_—a compilation which must be always distinguished from the work of the same title by Alban Butler. From these sources a great deal of truth and falsehood, fact and fiction, real record and unreal romance, have flowed forth upon the world. We cannot but speak reverently and kindly of such noble endeavors as those of Dr. Neale, but here, at the very outset, it must be understood that he has been altogether too much swayed by peculiar opinions for his ideas upon sequences—and upon Notker also—to have the weight of absolute authority. Notker himself is to be discriminated from another Notker of the same religious house of St. Gall, who is generally known as “the Physician.” This one is Balbulus, or “the Stammerer,” who is sometimes called “Vetustior,” the Elder, to distinguish him from his nephew, Notkerus Junior. He came, Ekkehard asserts, of noble and even royal parentage, being probably born about the year 850. At an early age he entered the monastery of St. Gall, in Switzerland, which had been founded by Gallus, the Irish saint, a disciple of Columbanus, in the seventh century. This celebrated man died, A.D. 640, at the age of ninety-five, and his life was written by Walafrid Strabo in two books; the martyrology recording his death upon October 16th. St. Gall itself is now a town of some fifteen thousand inhabitants, and the capital of the canton to which it has given its own name. But the abbey was suppressed in 1805, though the library, filled with valuable manuscripts, still remains. From these ancient parchments P. Gall Morel, Librarian at Einsiedeln, has resuscitated many sequences and hymns formerly employed in their services.