Paul the Lombard, generally known as Paulus Diaconus, probably made Charles’s acquaintance during his second visit to Italy (780–781). At any rate, somewhere about the year 782 he followed Charles across the Alps, and was for some two or three years in pretty close attendance at the Frankish court. The main object of his journey was to obtain pardon and the restitution of confiscated property for his brother Arichis who, as has been already stated, seems to have been involved in the rebellion of Duke Hrodgaud, and was carried captive into Frankland, leaving his wife and children destitute. There can be little doubt that the pardon of Arichis was granted to the intercession of his brother, for whom Charles seems to have conceived an especial affection. An amusing but fearfully perplexing series of poems exists, in which enigmas, compliments, and good-natured banter are exchanged between the king, Paulus Diaconus, and Petrus Pisanus. At dawn of day a trim young courtier with a hopeful little beard brings to Peter the grammarian a riddle which the king has thought of in the night and desires him to guess it. In despair Peter turns to Paul, begging for his aid. In a hexameter poem of forty-seven lines (all the correspondence is in verse) Paul gives his version of the answer, which, if correct, certainly proves the riddle to have been a very foolish one. At another time the king poetically asks Paul which of three penalties he would prefer--to be crushed under an immense weight of iron, to be doomed to lie in a gloomy dungeon-cave, or to be sent to convert and baptize Sigfrid who “wields the impious sceptre of pestilential Denmark.” Paul replies in a strain of enthusiastic devotion that he will do anything which the king desires him to do, but that as he knows no Danish he will seem like a brute beast when he stands in the presence of the barbarian king. Yet would he have no fear for his own safety if he undertook the journey: for if Sigfrid knew that he was one of Charles’s subjects, so great is his dread of the Frankish king that he would not dare to touch him with his little finger. And so on through many hexameter and pentameter verses. A harsh critic might describe the whole correspondence as “gracious fooling,” but in view of the hard and toilsome life of the slayer and converter of so many Saxons, it is a consolation to find that he had leisure and spare brain-power even for occasional nonsense. Paulus Diaconus, after a few years’ sojourn at the Frankish court, returned to Italy to the shelter of his beloved convent of Monte Cassino, where he died, probably in one of the closing years of the eighth century. We are indebted to him, not only for his well-known _Historia Langobardorum_--almost the only record of the history of Italy from 568 to 744--but also for a book on the _Gesta Episcoporum Mettensium_ which gives us valuable information as to the lives of the early Arnulfings.