Thus in Italy the antique education never stopped, antique reminiscence and tradition never passed away, and the literary matter of the pagan past never faded from the consciousness of the more educated among the laity and clergy. Some understanding of the classic literature, as well as a daily absorption of the antique from its survival in habits, laws, and institutions, made part of the capacities and temperament of Italians. Grammarians, lawyers, doctors, monks even, might think and produce under the influence of that which never had quite fallen from the life of Italy. And just as the ancient ways of civic life and styles of building became rude and impoverished, and yet passed on without any abrupt break into the tenth and the eleventh centuries, so was it with the literature of Italy, or at least with those productions which were sheer literature, and not deflected from traditional modes of expression by any definite business or by the distorting sentiments of Christian asceticism. This literature proper was likely to take the form of verse in the eleventh century. A practical matter would be put in prose; but the effervescence of the soul, or the intended literary effort, would fall into rhyme or resort to metre. We have an example of the former in those often-cited tenth-century verses exhorting the watchers on the walls of Modena: “O tu qui servas armis ista moenia, Noli dormire, moneo, sed vigila. Dum Hector vigil extitit in Troia, Non eam cepit fraudulenta Graecia. “Vigili voce avis anser candida Fugavit Gallos ex arce Romulea.” The antique reminiscence fills this jingle, as it does the sensuous “O admirabile Veneris ydolum Cuius materiae nichil est frivolum: Archos te protegat, qui stellas et polum Fecit et maria condidit et solum.”[302] And so on from century to century. At the beginning of the twelfth, a Pisan poet celebrates Pisa’s conquest of the Balearic Isles: “Inclytorum Pisanorum scripturus historiam, Antiquorum Romanorum renovo memoriam, Nam ostendit modo Pisa laudem admirabilem, Quam olim recepit Roma vincendo Carthaginem.”