Thoughts like these are sure to come to us when we encounter such a name as this of the poor cripple of Reichenau. Whatever fame he had in his own day gradually disappeared and he has been only a shadowy figure for many years. It is true that Ersch and Gruber, in their great encyclopaedia, say of him that he is “one of the most meritorious men of the eleventh century.” It is also true that Ussermann—himself an almost forgotten authority—has labored to give Hermann his proper meed of praise; and that the Benedictines have patiently collated many little particulars concerning him. Yet he still remains locked up in Latin or in German or in French; and English readers can be pardoned for being utterly ignorant of him and of his works. This man merits no small share of our notice. He came of good blood, for his father was the Count of Vöhringen in Suabia. He traced his kinship to the famous St. Udalric, whose sister, named Leutgarde, is mentioned (971) in the saintly bishop’s pages. Her son was Reginbald, slain in battle against the Hungarians in 955. This Reginbald had a daughter Bertha, who married Wolfrad, Count of Vöhringen, and died in 1032. Wolfrad, dying in 1010, had a son Wolfrad, who married a lady named Hiltrude and became the father of fifteen children—one of whom was Hermann. This is the simplest form of a genealogy, which the learned chronicler protracts in a marvellous manner, to the great confusion of the modern mind. I have not cared to follow him into the remoter affinities and alliances which add distinction to the poor little paralytic child, who at seven years of age was carried to the great school at St. Gall. I have said that Hermann was a cripple. He was so completely helpless, indeed, that he could not move without assistance; and his days and nights were full of pain. He was “hump-backed and bow-breasted, crippled and lame.” (_Gibosus ante et retro, et contractus, claudus_. Pertz: _Monumenta: Scriptores:_ V., 268.) But his mind triumphed over these infirmities. A pathetic legend concerning him assures us that in the visions of the night the Virgin stood before him, radiant and beautiful. As in the old story about the choice of Hercules—which was probably the origin of this—she offers him strength of body combined with ignorance and weakness of mind; or wisdom and ability in a body which should be deficient and sickly to the day of his death. This “second Hercules”—as the chronicler admiringly calls him—promptly chose the last.