Among the pupils of Rabanus Maurus was a boy afflicted with strabismus. He was cross-eyed, or crooked-eyed in some manner, and this fixed upon him the name of Strabo the “squinter.” Like many another monk in that age, he has so sunk himself into his service as to have become a man without a country and almost without parentage. Some therefore contend that he was an Anglo-Saxon, once a monk in London and afterward educated at St. Gall, Reichenau, and Fulda. An obscure tradition even makes him a relative of the Venerable Bede. Another story assigns him to Haymo’s family. Now, Haymo was a monk of Fulda about 850, a man of very liberal opinions, learned, and truly catholic, especially in his denial of the universal authority of the Pope and the doctrine of transubstantiation. It is something of an honor to have been this man’s brother, and it is no discredit to have been related to Bede. At any rate these guesses—for they are little else—serve to show us the repute in which Walafrid Strabo was held. More accurate investigation reveals a sentence in the preface to the life of St. Gall which seems conclusive. In it Walafrid speaks of “us Germans or Suabians.” Suabia is thus designated as his birthplace, and we find his name among the list of those scholars who did credit to their teacher Rabanus. His period is the middle of the ninth century, for in 842 he became Abbot of Reichenau in the diocese of Constance, and he died in 849. Dates like these are not hard to verify, for we have many chronicles and records in which the Dark Ages laid the foundations of authentic history. Here lie away in their narrow niches of brief reference many illustrious people. And the work of the hymnologist consists often enough in the same sort of research as secular history demands. Now and then on the dead breast there is a little withered flower ready to crumble into dust. That curious, peering Trithemius—to whom we are indebted for such laborious inquiries concerning the men of this time—maintains that Walafrid was “rector” of the school in the monastery of Hirschfeld. If this be so it only confirms what we note again and again, that Alcuin and Rabanus were the real instigators of German scholarship. And the work from which we shall presently quote becomes more interesting to us for this reason.