Gunzo neither forgave nor forgot. Passing on to the rival congregation of Reichenau, he composed a long and angry epistle of pedantic excuse and satirical invective, addressed to his former hosts.[314] In it he parades his wide knowledge of classic authors, justifies what the monks of St. Gall had presumed to mock as a ridiculous barbarism, and closes with a prayer for them in hexameters. His letter contains the interesting avowal, that, although the monk of St. Gall had wrongly deemed him ignorant of grammar, his Latin sometimes was impeded by the “usu nostrae vulgaris linguae, quae latinitati vicina est.” So a slip would be due not to unfamiliarity with Latin, but to an excessive colloquial familiarity with the vulgar tongue which had scarcely ceased to be Latin--an excuse no German monk could have given. It is amusing to see an Italian grammarian of this early period enter the lists to defend his reputation and assuage his wounded vanity. Later, such learned battles became frequent.[315] Gunzo died as the tenth century closed. Other Italians of his time and after him crossed the Alps to learn and teach and play the orator. From the early eleventh century comes a satirical sketch of one. The subject was a certain Benedict, Prior of the Abbey of St. Michael of Chiusa, and nephew of its abbot--therefore doubtless born to wealth and position. At all events as a youth he had moved about for nine years “per multa loca in Longobardia et Francia propter grammaticam,” spending the huge sum of two thousand gold soldi. His pride was unmeasured. “I have two houses full of books; there is no book on the earth that I do not possess. I study them every day. I can discourse on letters. There is no instruction to be had in Aquitaine, and but little in Francia. Lombardy, where I learned most, is the cradle of knowledge.” So the satire makes Benedict speak of himself. Then it makes a monk sketch Benedict’s sojourn at a convent in Angoulême: “He knows more than any man I ever saw. We have heard his chatter the whole day. _O quam loquax est!_ He is never tired. Wherever he may be, standing, sitting, walking, lying, words pour from his mouth like water from the Tigris. He orders the whole convent about as if he were Abbot. Monks, laity, clergy, do nothing without his nod. A multitude of the people, knights too, were always hastening to hear him, as the goal of their desires. Untired, hurling words the entire day, he sends them off worn out. And they depart, saying: Never have we seen sic eloquentem grammaticum.”[316] Another of these early wandering Italian humanists won kinder notice, a certain Lombard Guido, who died where he was teaching in Auxerre, in 1095, and was lamented in leonine hexameters: “Alas, famous man, so abounding, so diligent, so praised, so venerated through many lands-- “Filius Italiae, sed alumnus Philosophiae.