To estimate the literary qualities of classical Latin is a simpler task than to judge the Latinity and style of the Latin literature of the Middle Ages. Classic Latin prose has a common likeness. In general one feels that what Cicero and Caesar would have rejected, Tacitus and Quintilian would not have admitted. The syntax of these writers shows still greater uniformity. No such common likeness, or avoidance of stylistic aberration and grammatical solecism, obtains in mediaeval prose or verse. The one and the other include many kinds of Latin, and vary from century to century, diversified in idiom and deflected from linguistic uniformity by influences of race and native speech, of ignorance and knowledge. He who would appreciate mediaeval Latin will be diffident of academic standards, and mistrust his classical predilections lest he see aberration and barbarism where he might discover the evolution of new constructions and novel styles; lest he bestow encomium upon clever imitations of classical models, and withhold it from more living creations of the mediaeval spirit. He will realize that to appreciate mediaeval Latin literature, he must shelve his Virgil and his Cicero.[230] The following pages do not offer themselves even as a slight sketch of mediaeval Latin literature. Their purpose is to indicate the stages of development of the prose and the phases of evolution of the verse; and to illustrate the way in which antique themes and antique knowledge passed into vernacular poetry. Classical standards will supply us less with a point of view than with a point of departure. Nothing more need be said of the Latin of the Church Fathers and Gregory of Tours. But one must refer to the Carolingian period, in order to appreciate the Latin styles of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The revival of education and classical scholarship under the strong rule and fostering care of the greatest of mediaeval monarchs has not always been rightly judged. The vision of that prodigious personality ruling, christianizing, striving to civilize masses of barbarians and barbarized descendants of Romans and provincials; at the same time with eager interest endeavouring to revive the culture of the past, and press it into the service of the Christian faith; the striking success of his endeavours, men of learning coming from Ireland, England, Spain, and Italy, creating a peripatetic centre of knowledge at the imperial court, and establishing schools in many a monastery and episcopal residence--all this has never failed to arouse enthusiasm for the great achievement, and has veiled the creative deadness of it all, a deadness which in some provinces of intellectual endeavour was quite veritably moribund, while in others it betokened the necessary preparation for creative epochs to come.[231]