At the close of the ninth century appeared Rollo, who led the flower of the Norwegian nobles, the chivalry of western Scandinavia. They embarked not for plunder, but to lay the foundations of empire, to seek an appropriate field whereon to work out the great destiny for which they were reserved. They founded the order of _Gentlemen_, whose mission was to diffuse that spirit of chivalry which had but dimly dawned on the imagination of the older world, in the isolated careers of a Pericles, Epaminondas, or Scipio. To them belonged a rank and a nobility that resides not in prerogative, and has no necessary connection with coronets and ermine. It was that innate dignity which kings can not give, or parliaments annul; a distinction the Norman might well be proud to recognize as the birth-right of his fathers and his own. The best qualities of the Teutonic nations, to whom the cause of universal civilization is intrusted, find their germ in the genius of the Norman race. It is for that reason that we should linger reverently through the aisles once echoing to their tread, by the columns once darkened with their shadows, the fortresses that sheltered them while living, and the tombs that received them when dead. Let us never forget that while the monasteries were preserving the precious monuments of the old world, the recesses of baronial heights witnessed the first essays of literature, and fostered the earliest productions of European imagination. But letters continued to decline from the fall of the western empire, for nearly five hundred years; they then gradually improved for about the same period, until they arrived at the highest splendor in the golden age of Leo X. From the opening of the eleventh century the prospects of literature began to brighten. Gerbert, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, Scotus, and Roger Bacon, were resplendent lights to herald yet mightier names.