Sometimes these same expressions of our poet betoken a convivial familiarity with his friend Gregory of Tours, which is not precisely canonical. Many post-classical words appear, and phrases which no grammarian would easily justify. The man is full of sly hints of good eating and drinking, and has a high-flown style of compliment, as when he writes to Lupus, “As often as I put together the parts of your discourse, I thought that I reclined upon ambrosial roses.” To Sigismund and Aregesles, two brothers, he declares that, “This sweet letter reveals to me the names of friends. Here is the brilliant Sigismund, and here is the modest Aregesles. After Italy, O Rhine, thou givest me parents, and by the coming of these brothers I shall be no longer a stranger.” In fact, he picked up “brothers” and “parents” with charming facility, and had a dexterity in drawing a corner of the mantle of royal favor over him which any courtier might covet. Thus he went—we cannot well detect in what order or by what method, but pretty conclusively as a troubadour might have done—all through France. Like Chamisso, he proposed to “Take his harp in his hand And wander the wide world over, Singing from land to land.” With Sigebert, King of Austrasia, he contracted quite a friendship, and being at Poitiers when Gelesuintha was put to death, he lamented her in verses which pleased Sigebert, her brother-in-law and avenger, greatly. He also became well acquainted with Euphronius of Tours, nephew of St. Gregory, the bishop, and thus laid a good foundation for ecclesiastical preferment. But it was to Poitiers that he gradually drifted, and there circumstances fixed him for the most of his life. We may safely conclude that Tours, which is not a great distance off, first attracted his wandering feet. He had a duty to the blessed St. Martin’s holy lamp and to the blessed St. Martin’s holy memory, and these devout proceedings were more than sufficient to commend him to a hospitable bishop. Contemporary accounts of him are lacking, if we except the brief notice of Paul the Deacon, which cannot properly be called contemporary, as it is in his history of the Lombards, which was prepared in the first half of the eighth century. But Fortunatus again comes to our rescue with quite a goodly supply of verses and with some epistles which show that the life of that period was a curious resultant between the Roman and barbarian ideas. It ought in honesty to be added that Brunehilda was no saint, and that the court of the Merovingians was so barbaric that it stood by and saw her torn to death, at eighty, at the heels of a wild horse; and this was later even than Fortunatus’s day.