A Torch Bearer

To the lover of ancient learning and the classical spirit, who looks forward from the fast-fading twilight of the fifth or backward from the dazzling sunrise of the fifteenth century, there seems at the first glance to lie between these two epochs a period of perfectly impenetrable blackness. Like most dark places, however, this murky millennium proves to him who has once found the courage to plunge in and explore it less blind and impassable than it looked from without. To the eye that steadily confronts them the shadows lighten ; a glimmering pathway is first discerned, then landmarks, and finally footprints of more than one traveler. The life of the race is after all continuous. The customs and institutions which served mankind under one order of things are found reparable after seeming ruin, and capable of being adapted, with certain modifications, to wholly new conditions of existence. Take the case of life in a mediæval abbey and its dependencies. It was Châteaubriand, perhaps, who first suggested the notion that it was, at least on its material side, only a natural development or adaptation of life within the precincts of a great Roman villa. The abbot corresponded to the proprietor. The monks were like the freedmen of the great patrician, who cultivated letters, art, and science under the shelter of the villa proper. In both cases the property comprised a more or less extensive area of outlying territory, the inhabitants of whose farms and villages were, to all intents and purposes, attached to the glebe, lived by supplying the central establishment with the fruits of their industry, and expected protection from it in times of common peril.

The great Roman overlord had indeed, in most cases, other and richer sources of revenue than the labor of these humble tenants, and so had the mediæval abbot in the voluntary offerings of pious pilgrims to whatever saintly shrine or shrines might lie within his jurisdiction. The Benedictine abbey of St. Riguier, near Abbeville, for example, possessed and governed, at its most flourishing period, fourteen towns, thirty villages, and an “ infinite number ” of farms, while the offerings at the tomb of the holy Richiarius amounted to about four hundred thousand dollars yearly.

This was in Gaul under the Merovingian kings. A hundred years later, under Charlemagne, certain of the more famous and venerable abbeys, like those of St. Martin at Tours and St. Hilary at Poictiers, had considerably declined in wealth and importance ; but the monastic establishments of the kingdom, taken collectively, were at the height of their dignity and influence. The great abbots occupied a singularly independent position. They were bound by the terms of their tenure of landed property to give a certain material support to their temporal masters ; but they stoutly resisted any assumption of authority by the local bishops, against whose claims they were beginning to appeal to the high and general court of Christendom at Rome. At that time and for many succeeding years a monastic life opened one of the shortest roads to court favor, such as it then was, and afforded absolutely the only chance for the cultivation of letters under conditions of peace and comparative refinement. The number of those who affected such conditions and yearned for such culture was not large, but among them — one might almost say foremost among them, at his own particular epoch — was a certain abbot of Ferrières, in central France, by name Servatus Lupus. Some hundred and twenty of this man’s private letters have been saved from the wreckage of his time. They reveal a mobile and inquisitive mind, athirst from its first conscious hour for the springs of human learning, and with an inherent attraction toward pagan antiquity which would have caused him to revel in the thought that his cloister life was but an evolution or adaptation of that of a Roman senator in retreat. These letters reflect at the same time so vivid a light on some of the more important actors and stirring events of the writer’s chaotic period that the only wonder is they should have been so generally neglected. Lupus ¹ was born during the last decade of the reign of Charles the Great, probably in the year 805 or 806. Of his birthplace we only know that it was somewhere in Gaul, of his rank that it was noble, of his kindred that two of his brothers were successively bishops of Auxerre, while a certain learned and saintly Marquard, abbot of the cloister of Prüm, not far from Treves, was a near relation of Lupus as well as a devoted friend.

Lupus received his early training in the monastery of which he was afterwards to be the head, and Ferrières was a place with a history. The cloister occupied a commanding site between the Seine and the Loire, at the point where these two rivers approach nearest to each other in the modern department of Loiret. Dense forests, cleft by wild and all but impassable valleys, encircled the spot, and the conventual stronghold probably owed to its exceptional position the immunity which it long enjoyed from the incursions of those Norse pirates whose descendants triumphed at Hastings two centuries later.

The church of Ferrières was an extremely ancient building, dating, it was believed, from the first introduction of Christianity into Gaul; and in the later days of Lupus’s own rule it became a labor of love with him to restore, or rather replace, the venerable structure, and furnish it with a leaden roof, the material for which he secured in Britain. The ties between Ferrières and the Church in England were numerous and strong. The abbey had even been held for the years between 782 and 796 by the celebrated Alcuin, who came from that centre of light and learning the great monastery at York to open what was known as the School of the Palace in the house of Charlemagne.

It is plain that the young Lupus soon came to the end of what he could learn at Ferrières, where there was no such complete and systematic course of instruction as that for which the ambitious pupil pined. Such he found, however, at Fulda, in the diocese of Treves,— the Primat of the German abbeys, founded by St. Boniface, and the resting-place of his dust, where the most important school of the ninth century was then flourishing under the headship of the Abbot Rabanus Maurus.

From Fulda, where he seems to have passed the active and animated years between twenty - five and thirty, and where he formed the chief friendships of his life, Lupus wrote the first letter of the collection which we possess. It is addressed to one of the most interesting men of that or of any time, — to no less a person than that Einhard, or Eginhard, the secretary and exceedingly graphic biographer of Charlemagne, who had shared with the children of the emperor the advantages of Alcun’s palaceschool, and was possibly also the son-inlaw of Charlemagne. Every one knows the romantic story of the young scribe to whom the Princess Emma accorded her favors, who lingered too late one winter night in his lady’s turret chamber, until the courtyard of the palace had been whitened by a stealthy snowfall, sure to betray the footprints of the returning lover ; and how, to avoid discovery, the vigorous young princess — who was evidently a " menskful maiden of might,” like Brunehild — lifted him upon her shoulders and bore him to his own quarters. But Charlemagne was wakeful that night, and pacing and peering about, as an anxious monarch may do, he witnessed this extraordinary transit “ by the cold, white light of the moon.” The mixture of shrewdness and magnanimity which led the emperor first to exact a full confession from his protégé, and then to offer him the hand of his daughter in honorable marriage, is no more than might have been expected of the great Charles. But alas for romance ! only one monkish chronicler has preserved the tale in this artistic and symmetrical form, while in the list carefully given by Eginhard himself of Charlemagne’s children, legitimate and illegitimate, there is no mention of any Emma or Imma. The name of Eginhard’s dearly loved wife is usually written in the latter way. They lived long and happily together as a married pair ; as neighbors, evidently, and with frequent and tender fraternal intercourse, even after Eginhard became the lay abbot of the monastery which he himself had founded at Seligenstadt.

It is to this place that Lupus writes a modest and graceful letter of self-introduction ; praying for the privilege of Eginhard’s acquaintance, expressing admiration of his Life of Charlemagne, and asking, after an apt quotation or two from the Satires of Horace and the Tusculan Disputations, for the loan of some of the abbot’s worldly books.

“ Having once overpassed the limits of modesty, I make bold to pray that you will entrust me, while I am staying here, with certain of your texts, though to be sure I have asked a far greater favor in your friendship than I could receive from your books. These, however, are the ones which I should like: first, Tully on Rhetoric, of which I possess only a very imperfect copy; . . . then, under the general head of Rhetoric, by the same author, three books of discussions or dialogues on the Orator. I think you must have these, because I found written in the catalogue of your library, after a mention of the book to Herennius and some other alien matter, Cicero on Rhetoric, and then Commentary on the Books of Cicero. I should also like the Attic Nights of A. Gellius ; and there are a great many others in the same catalogue which, if God give me grace with you, I should most particularly desire to have, after these are sent back, and to copy while I am here. By complying with my request you will show that you pardon my presumption, and you will fill with the sweetest fruit of learning one who has long been digging at its bitter roots.”

In the next letter the vanities of scholarship are forgotten in a heartfelt expression of simple human feeling : —

“ Lupus to Eginhard, his dearly beloved preceptor.

“ I have been unspeakably shocked by the sad news of the death of your venerable wife, and I wish more than ever that I could be with you now to lighten your sorrow by my sympathy, or else perhaps to assuage it through earnest discourse concerning the thoughts which are suggested by many an eloquent passage of Holy Writ. Meanwhile, until God suffers me to join you, I beseech you to be mindful of that universal lot which sinful humanity has deservedly incurred, and to endure your calamity in a brave and collected spirit. Do not you cower before misfortune, who presented so steadfast a front to the insidious temptations of prosperity. Rally that manly fortitude to which you would incite any one you truly loved who might be stricken by a like misfortune, and call upon the name of the Lord. And may all good be with you.”

Eginhard’s answer is long and affecting. He appreciates his young friend’s sympathy, and is far from resenting that clarion call to heroic endurance which he finds himself too old and too broken to obey.

“ Eginhard to his Lupus, greeting.

“ My overwhelming sorrow for the loss of her who was once my most faithful wife, and afterward for long my dearest sister and companion, has well-nigh killed in me all interest and care whether for my own affairs or those of my friends. . . . I have by me the writings of noble and learned men, teachers never to be despised, but worthy of all attention and obedience, — such as the glorious martyr Cyprian, and those most illustrious expositors of the divine word Augustine and Jerome; and I have endeavored to take heart from their wise and bracing counsels, to rise up under the load of my sorrow, and earnestly to consider what I ought to feel concerning the departure of my most dear companion, having seen ' the end of her mortality rather than her life.’ ² I have tried even to force upon myself, by the exercise of reason, what is wont to come only after a long lapse of years; I mean the closing of the wound which my spirit received through the sudden calamity of that most grievous loss, — the beginning of cure by the remedy of spontaneous consolation. But the stab was too deep for such easy methods. . . . Perchance you may marvel at me, and say that grief of this kind was not meant to endure forever, as if it were in the mourner’s power to set limits to that whose beginnings he could neither foresee nor control. . . . Nay, nay ; my belief is, and your arguments will not shake it, that my anguish for the death of my best beloved will last until the appointed end of that space of time which God has allotted me in this sad and transitory world. ... It cannot be, methinks, that I shall long survive, and yet I do not at all know how long. But this one thing is sure: ' a babe may die soon ; an old man cannot last long.’ ”

It will be perceived that the learned abbot has again fallen — unconsciously, as it would seem — into quotation. This time it is the rather stinging reply of St. Jerome’s friend Marcella to her importunate old suitor which he wrests to his own sorry comfort.

Lupus wrote Eginhard another long letter upon the same subject, but the reader will hardly need to be informed that he found nothing new to say. He also arranged to pay the sad old man a visit on his way back from Fulda to Ferrières, and apparently carried out his purpose early in 836. This was the year, also, of his first appearance at the Frankish court, for in 837 we find him writing to his brother Reginbert: —

“ Last year, through the influence of friends, I was presented to the emperor, and also to the queen, by whom I was most graciously received ; . . . and now, on the 22d of September, I am about starting for the palace, the queen herself having earnestly pressed me to come ; so that many think some special honor will soon be conferred upon me.”

The royal pair with whom Lupus thus made acquaintance were Louis the Debonair, — more properly the Pious, — the son of Charlemagne, and his second wife, Judith, “ whom,” says Eginhard, “ he chose after an inspection of almost all the maidens of the realm who were of noble birth.” Louis must have been attracted, one would think, in this high-spirited and unscrupulous woman, by qualities the very reverse of his own. She schemed boldly and successfully, against tremendous odds, to secure the succession of her own son, Charles the Bald, to that portion of the vast empire of his grandfather which corresponds most nearly to the France of to-day; but she did not at this time fulfill the pleasant dreams of Lupus, who had some years yet to wait for his preferment.

He carried back with him, however, to the forest solitude of Ferrières a reputation for learning which caused him to be received with deep respect by Odo, the abbot, and he was immediately made rector of the convent school. He thought he discerned among the denizens of his old monastery a reviving interest in the things of the mind which bade fair to lighten his labors as an instructor, and there is a very interesting fragment extant of a sort of report which Lupus appears to have addressed some years later to the members of a synod convened in the diocese of Sens, in which he says that though he has had to deplore the untimely death of some of his brightest pupils, yet others have come to take their places who are either full of early promise, or who, “being already proficient, desire still further to increase their attainments.”

There is also a curious letter of the time immediately succeeding Lupus’s return to Ferrières addressed to one Immo, Bishop of Noyon, who was afterward murdered by the Norman pirates. Immo would seem to have cautioned Lupus against intellectual pride, and perhaps even hinted at the ungodly nature of some of his literary pursuits, for the latter replies with a suspicion of warmth :

“ I do not quite understand why you should be so anxious to know what books I read or wrote in Germany, unless you wish to make an example of me by proposing a difficult dilemma, and so convicting me either of ostentation or of youthful rashness. I can only say quite simply that I passed my time there chiefly in reading, and in the preparation of certain small textbooks which might serve as aids to learning and remedies for oblivion ; and it was by no means for love of the German tongue, as has been ridiculously suggested, that I underwent the burden of so severe a daily labor.

“ However,” he adds with his wonted sweetness, “ I thank you for reminding me, on divine authority, that I ought to be watchful and preserve my humility of mind.”

Singularly enough, we have the means of judging for ourselves how far Lupus was justified in this disrespectful mention of the nascent German tongue, for the date of the letter in question corresponds almost exactly with that of a very important philological monument, one which has often been taken as a point of departure for histories of the modern European dialects, — the famous oath of Strasburg.

Certain expressions in the beginning of the letter to Immo refer it conclusively to the autumn of 841. Now Louis the Debonair had died the year before, and war was then raging between his son Lothaire and his grandson Pepin on the one side and his sons Louis the German and Charles the Bald on the other. Lothaire had already suffered a severe defeat at Fontenoy,³ but during the campaign of 842 he had recovered sufficiently to press very hard the armies of Louis and Charles, who finally concentrated their forces on the borders of the Rhine near Strasburg, and swore, in the presence of their legions, a new oath of alliance for mutual defense. By way of making this covenant at once more binding on themselves and more intelligible to their hosts it was taken in the popular language of the two peoples. Louis the German, as he was called, swore in Romance, and Charles the Bald in the Alemannish of the period, and the rude, stammering, inchoate syllables were written down phonetically, together with their translation into monkish Latin. “Pro Don amur, et pro Christian poblo,” began Louis, and “In Godes minna ind um tes Christianes folches” echoed Charles.

The Church in general inclined to the side of Charles and Louis, for the reason that Lothaire had sought heathenish alliances with Saxons and with Saracens; but none the less did Abbot Odo, who was obliged by the terms of the charter of Ferrières to lead his contingent of troops into the field, espouse the cause of Lothaire and Pepin, of whom the latter kept up the struggle in Aquitaine for several years longer. It was a time of great anxiety and suspense for Lupus, who was personally loyal to Charles the Bald, but who was left in charge of the cloister when Odo took the field for Lothaire, and who, as early as 841, had written several letters in the name of the latter, in one of which he says, " We fluctuate in a strait betwixt two, not knowing in the least who will make good his claim to this most important region of ours.”

It was Charles the Bald who did so, as we know, whereupon Odo was deposed without loss of time, and Lupus was made abbot in his stead. The office was theoretically elective, but Charles had no need to do more than suggest a candidate to the monks of Ferrières, for those were not days in which the royal advice on such a matter could safely be disregarded. Lupus accepted his promotion with equal docility, but did not hesitate, in the candor of his spirit, to place the responsibility for the change exactly where it belonged. Shortly after his elevation he wrote a letter to the Bishop of Orléans, deploring the destruction (probably by the Norman freebooters) of sundry farms and vineyards in that diocese, whose revenues were a perquisite of the abbey of Ferrières, and then proceeded as follows: —

“ I know not what sort of lying report has reached you concerning our former abbot; but that you may give it no further credence allow me to offer your sanctity a veracious account of what did really happen. Our lord the king gave orders that he should be dismissed from the monastery, prefacing the command by certain remarks concerning Odo which it may be as well not to repeat. On my return to the monastery I communicated the tidings to the abbot as gently as possible; men were told off to escort him, and horses, clothes, and money supplied him for his journey. I myself, being under orders from our lord the king, had to quit the monastery on the last day of November, but I left instructions that he should be out of it before the 3d of December, on which day I expected to appear before our lord the king. This I did ; and he, after according me a ceremonious reception, inquired what I had done with the aforesaid abbot. I, who supposed that the abbot had kept faith with me, replied that I had executed his [the king’s] orders concerning him. I then got leave to depart, but as I drew near the monastery, on the 12th of December, I learned that the oft-mentioned abbot was still there. Much disturbed at the discovery that I had been fibbing to our lord, I dispatched a messenger to the abbot by night, telling him squarely that he must be out before break of day ; that it was unpardonable of him to be staying on in defiance of the king’s command, and preventing me from coming in. He replied that he had always intended to leave the next day, and I, in order to afford no handle whatever for calumny, answered that I would not enter until he was out. So at last he departed from the community, I allowing him the same abundant provision as before, and some other things beside. I lost no time in laying the matter before my friends at court, and also, at the earliest opportunity, I confessed that inadvertent falsehood of mine to the king, and they all agreed in thinking that I had done perfectly right. Let those who have spread other stories see whether they have been justified in so doing. I have most assuredly had a single eye in the whole business, whence I trust that, under Providence, my whole body will be found full of light.

“ And so farewell, and may all good attend you.”

Lupus entered upon his new duties at the close of 842, devoting himself heart and soul to the welfare of the monastery both in temporal and spiritual things. We have already seen him taking measures to restore the hoary church, and looking after his humbler dependencies in the neighborhood of Orléans. But there was a far more precious and important appanage of Ferrières, which had been severed from the domain of the abbey during the brief period of Lothaire’s ascendency in central France, and given to one of his creatures. This was the so-called Cell of St. Judocus, now St.-Josse-sur-Mer, then a basilica with a small cloister attached, in the diocese of Amiens. The holy Judocus was an Armorican prince who had renounced the world and his claims to the throne of his father, and built this fair church in the wilderness about two hundred years before Lupus’s day. The monastery had been given by Charlemagne to the English Alcuin, at the time when the latter was abbot of Ferrières, to be used as a house of entertainment for pilgrims ; chiefly, no doubt, for those who came from the British Isles. Some objections had been made at the time on the ground of the law against pluralities, but these were overruled, and Louis the Debonair confirmed the union of the two establishments. The Cell retained its humble name, but it was richly endowed and its lands were highly cultivated. The extraordinary beauty of the site and surroundings once inspired a monkish poet with so sweet a strain of elegiac verse that one hastens to cull it like some rare flower of the wilderness. It may be freely rendered thus : —

In that final division of territory among the descendants of Charles the Great which was effected by the treaty of Verdun this beautiful bit of ecclesiastical property was included in the portion of Charles the Bald, who presently bestowed it upon a layman named Odulf. But Lupus was resolved to have it back. He appreciated its loveliness, prized its associations, and needed its revenues; and he forthwith began to besiege the monarch in a series of vivacious letters, some extracts from which may be found interesting.

He reminds his sovereign that “ the most pious Emperor Louis, author of your nobility,” at the request of “Judith Augusta, your mother of all-glorious memory,” had confirmed by a charter the union of St. Josse and Ferrières, "to the end that the monks of this monastery might serve the Lord in easy circumstances and entertain pilgrims in the aforesaid Cell with godly hospitality, and comfortably pray to God for the health and security of them both [Louis and Judith]. This their deed of charity you at first most graciously approved, and even confirmed it by fresh enactments ; but later you were induced by certain persons, who care not how they offend God so only they get rich, to make null and void this double benefaction. . . . The consequence is that the servants of God in this place, who do always pray for you, have failed now for three years to receive their accustomed allowance of clothing ; and that which they are compelled to wear is worn to rags and very much patched. They subsist upon market vegetables, with exceedingly rare consolation of fish or cheese ; and even the servants are not paid the wages which are justly their due : because all these things used to accrue to us from the aforesaid Cell, for whose present state of dilapidation and its neglect of strangers from beyond the sea may God not hold you responsible.”

Again he writes: —

“ Even while we held [our possessions intact] we had no harmful superfluity, nor were we tempted to dally in the lap of luxury ; for the entire resources of the monastery barely sufficed to provide us with what our rule allows. Now, however, for a long time, we have had to put up with much less. We cannot keep warm, and we abstain when we would not; and the sick and children and the aged are uncared for.” “ If you desire to know,” he says bluntly in another letter, " what they [the brothers] really say about you, it is this: that it is most unfair for you to exercise them with cold and hunger while they are under bonds to pray without ceasing for your temporal and eternal welfare ; and they do not think you will ever attain the felicity to which you aspire so long as you make not your peace with our little St. Peter [the patron of Ferrières]. And you need not fancy that they speak in jest; for our old men say that they had it from their fathers, when they were boys, and can confirm it by their own experience, that whoever inflicts any marked injury upon our house incurs thereby great peril of his own health and life, unless he do quickly repent.”

After a half dozen years or so of unwearied and undaunted importunity on the part of our abbot the king succumbed, and St. Josse was reunited to Ferrières. The precise date of the formal restitution is not known; but the first allusion to it in the correspondence of Lupus occurs in a letter to the Archbishop of York, written from the Cell itself, and praying for a renewal of the relations with England which had subsisted in the days of Alcuin. Lupus also takes advantage of the comparatively easy communication with England which he now enjoys to request of a certain abbot in the city of York the loan of sundry books which he wishes to have copied, namely, Bede on the Old and New Testament, the Disputations of St. Jerome, the books of Jerome on Jeremiah after the first six which he already possesses, and the twelve books of the Institutions of Quintilian. King Ethelred of England had married a daughter of Charles the Bald, and it was to him, therefore, that Lupus applied for the lead which was wanted for the new church roof at Ferrières. The request appears to have been readily granted ; and accordingly rafts of especial strength were built for the conveyance of the unwieldy metal up the rivers Seine and Cléry. Their construction was all the more necessary because Lupus had had the misfortune to lose ten of the convent horses, when making a tour of inspection among the monasteries of Burgundy in company with the Bishop of Troyes. Lupus had also his military service to perform, like Odo before him ; and in June of 844, the detachment of troops with which his contingent was marching to the support of Charles the Bald under the walls of Toulouse having been cut off by a raid of Pepin’s men, the abbot was taken prisoner. He says in one of his letters that he "lost everything;” but his captivity was at least a brief one, for we find him writing that “ by the signal grace of God, and the intercession of his saints, and the intervention of one Count Turpio ” (of Angoulême), he was back again in his cloister, “ safe and sound, on the 5th of July.”

Before the close of the same year we find him drawing up the twelve canons of the Council of Verneuil; and very curious some of them are, as, for example : —

No. 6. “A maiden who has been married by one man, and then seized and appropriated by another, must, according to the tenth statute of the Council of Ancyra, be restored to the man by whom she was first espoused, even though she have suffered violence. But it is recommended that the ravager be threatened with the penalties of the secular law, since criminals of this class make very light of ecclesiastical excommunication.”

No. 7. “ If any nuns, from what they falsely deem a religious motive, do either adopt male attire or shave the head, since we hold this to be a sin of ignorance rather than of perversity, it is ordained that they be [merely] admonished and whipped.”

Lupus is almost always found at the synods from this time on, and there is a letter of his, of the year 849, which shows pretty plainly what he himself thought of the relative cogency of his civil and ecclesiastical obligations : —

“ Lupus to Pardulus, the bishop, his dearly and singularly beloved, greeting in the Lord.

“I did not attend the synod, because I was not summoned by our lord the king. I have taken care that his letter should be exactly copied, so that if by chance my name is mentioned you may be able to show that I was justified in remaining away. However, since you have been so good as to admit me to your friendship, I do beseech you that now and always, as God gives you opportunity, you will intercede in my behalf. You know very well that I was never instructed in the principles of attack and defense, nor how to fulfill any of the duties, whether of infantry or cavalry service ; nor is it warriors only of whom our lord the king stands in need. I entreat you, therefore, to use your influence, and if possible also that of Hincmar,⁴ to induce him [the king] to consider my [sacred] profession and assign me some duty less inconsistent with it: the rather since he really holds my [military] services very cheap. If you truly love me, you will manage this thing in such a way that I shall not only incur no odium, but may even get a little credit thereby.”

Lupus probably refers, in this letter, to the preparations for the last expedition of Charles the Bald against Nomenoius, the rebellious king of Brittany. If so, our abbot was not wholly excused from service, as he desired, but he came safely home, after a brief campaign ; while Nomenoius, who had declared his independence on the death of Louis the Debonair, maintained the same successfully until his sudden and rather mysterious death in 851. He had disposed in the most high-handed manner of the bishoprics within his province, altering the bounds of sees, pulling down one ecclesiastic and setting up another. His arbitrary arrangements, strange to say, subsisted almost unchanged until the time of the great revolution, but they were regarded as acts of heinous aggression in his own day ; and it seems to have been for the purpose of protesting against some of these enormities that Lupus was sent on a mission to the head of Christendom at Rome some time in the later forties. This journey was a very great event; and how anxiously and assiduously the abbot made his preparations for departure will appear from the following naïve letter to his friend the saintly Marquard : —

“ For purposes of prayer and the transaction of certain church business, which, God willing, I will explain more fully to your paternity on my return, I am about starting for Rome. And since I cannot succeed in these affairs without the apostolical [that is to say, the papal] good will, and I know well that this can be won only by means of gifts, I hie me to you, as to my father’s — nay, my mother’s — bosom ; begging that you, who have never yet failed me in any time of need, will deign to assist me now. Be so good, therefore, as to forward me — if possible by the messengers whom I send — two cloaks of dark blue woolen cloth, and the same number of those linen ones which the Germans call glizza,⁵ which I understand that he [the Pope] greatly admires. If you are unable to execute the whole of this commission, don’t fancy that I shall despise the half; for I have learned from my worldly books always to ask for more than I expect to get.

“ Lest, however, you should imagine that I am at the end of my desires, I will add that, should you choose to facilitate my journey by the gift of a trotting nag or any other beast of uncommon strength, I should consider it a great favor. Seriously, though, I shall not take it amiss if I get nothing, provided only you read this letter to our dear Egil,⁶ and you and he keep to yourselves the good laugh I trust it will give you.”

Lupus also applied to an Italian bishop, bearing the exceedingly Gothic name of Regenfried, to have gold of the country ready for him when he should pass through the diocese of the latter, on his way to the south ; and this is all we hear about the Roman journey at the time of its occurrence. But there is a letter addressed some ten years later by the abbot of Ferrières to his apostolic lord, Benedict III., in which he tells that pontiff that he had been most graciously received and entertained by his Holiness’s predecessor of blessed memory; whence we may perhaps conclude that the glizza did not prove wholly unacceptable to that fourth Leo, from whom the “ Leonine City ” took its name.

Lupus held one rather famous theological controversy with an heretical monk of Fulda named Gotteschalk, on the inexhaustible subjects of predestination and freewill ; and he was thought to have acquitted himself more gloriously in this field than in the campaigns which he served under Charles, and quite to have demolished his adversary. But the book De Tribus Quæstionibus, in which his own arguments are properly marshaled, is dreary reading compared with the letters, to which we return for a few more indications concerning the course of our friend’s declining years.

The cloister of Ferrières enjoyed for a long while a marvelous immunity from the ravages of the Northmen, who devastated, at one time or another, nearly the whole of the surrounding country. But its inmates lived in a state of constant apprehension, as may be gathered from the following letter addressed to the abbot of Tours : —

“ It could hardly have occurred to your amplitude to think of confiding your treasure to us [probably the relics of St. Martin and some of the richer offerings at his shrine] if you had understood the situation of our house. Had you done so, indeed, you could not have wished your valuables to remain here for ever so short a time, not to speak of any permanent custody. For though we may seem tolerably difficult of approach by the pirates (to whom, nevertheless, for our sins, no way is long and no ascent arduous), yet are our defenses very weak ; and we have so few men capable of bearing arms that we positively invite the greed of those ruffians, who, finding us incapable of resistance, can lay hands on whatever they like, and, escaping to the cover of the woods, disperse in safety, and so baffle all pursuit.”

And here is an extract, one of many, illustrating the dangers of the road.

“ Of course,” writes Lupus to his “best beloved” brother Reginbert, “we are eagerly anticipating the visit which your letters announce ; but I do beseech you to use the greatest caution on your way hither. For really, under the present state of things in this realm of our lord King Charles, highway robbery is committed with perfect impunity; and cases of theft and violence are of everyday occurrence. See to it that you join a party large enough and strong enough either to preclude an attack by these miscreants, or, if need be, to repel it.”

At all hazards, however, Lupus will have his brother bring him some books. “ The Catiline and Jugurtha of Sallust, if you please, and the Verrenian books [is this Cicero against Verres, or something of Verro’s?], and anything else which you may happen to know that we either do not possess at all or only in an imperfect copy. We shall be deeply indebted to you for the means of correcting our corrupt texts ; and still more so for those which we had hardly hoped to get on any terms, and never should have gotten but for you.”

The unquenchable zeal of Lupus for the enrichment, at all costs, of the convent library finds further expression in a letter written to a scholarly monk of Prüm named Alsbald : —

“ The copy of Tully’s letters which you sent I have caused to be compared with ours, hoping that, from the two, the truth may be made out. Please deliver also to the bearer of this Tully’s translation of Aratus, that I may supply from it the things which our friend Egil believes to be wanting in the one I am about to acquire.”

There were, plainly, almost hopeless discrepancies in the two copies of Cicero’s letters here mentioned, but the allusion is curious for the reason that the correspondence disappeared entirely during the next five hundred years, and was only rediscovered by Petrarch at Verona in the fourteenth century.

Lupus also writes to Marquard to get a copy made for him of Suetonius Tranquillus’ Lives of the Caesars. “ And either bring it to me yourself, which would be best of all, or, if by my sins I have forfeited so great a boon, see that it is dispatched by a perfectly safe messenger, for the book is not to be had in these parts.”

Beside the classical authors already named, we find mentioned or quoted in the works of Lupus, Livy, Martial, Virgil, Horace, Catullus, Cæsar, Priscian, Macrobius, Josephus, Boethius, and many more. He was considered an authority on Latin grammar, and cited as such. His thirty-fourth epistle, which is addressed to an otherwise unknown monk, treats extensively of the quantity of increments in the third declension, and contains beside a rather subtle discussion, illustrated by many quotations, of the difference in meaning between ulciscor and vindico.

The rich bindings of the books of that day rendered them tempting prizes to the highwayman ; and on one occasion, after writing to Bishop Hincmar that he had given the bearer ten pine cones (probably for seed), which were all the man could conveniently carry, Lupus adds that he dared not send Bede’s Extracts from Augustine’s Commentary on St. Paul, “ because the book is too large either to be concealed in the bosom or safely shut up in a wallet; and even so, the extraordinary beauty of the codex might have kindled the rapacity of the wicked, and so the volume would have been lost both to you and me.” This is probably the very copy of Bede which Lupus had had made at St. Josse from the York original, and its perfecta pulchritudo may have been due both to the clearness of the text and the splendor of its integument. We know from the letters that not only gold and silver smiths, but gem-cutters, were among the craftsmen employed in Lupus’s community; and we even hear of a painter who had vowed “ to the blessed martyrs ” certain pictures for the church at Seligenstadt, where a new abbot now reigned in the place of Eginhard, released from his troubles in 814.

The latest letter of Lupus which we possess appears to have been written about the year 862 ; certainly not earlier. It is addressed to the Bishop of Troyes, and abounds in the most affecting expressions of gratitude for hospitality lately extended him by that prelate on the occasion of a specially formidable expedition of the Norse pirates up the river Seine, before which the defenseless denizens of Ferrières had been fain to fly : —

“When I lay smitten by heavy sickness you came to see me, and you found us in a state of extreme alarm. Making haste to remove all painful sense of obligation, you anticipated my prayer by offering me the farm of Aquense [now Aix-en - Othe] the most important in your diocese, where I might safely hide me from the iniquity of the time, nor be wholly deprived of the means of exercising my sacred profession.” He hopes that the bishop will allow him to seek the same refuge again should further need arise. “ For you know,” he says, “ that though this house of ours is called Bethlehem, that is to say the house of bread [!], our supplies of the same would soon fail were it not for your charity and that of other welldisposed friends. Be mindful, therefore, of the sure promise. You would not lack interest on the debt were you to feed us your clients gratis for a half month. And do not think me frivolous or froward, but remember that I am an adept in rhetoric, which teaches us to ask for more than we expect to receive.”

With this rather sorry application of a jest of happier days our untimely humanist fades away into the dusk of the evil days impending.

Harriet Waters Preston.

Louise Dodge.