a
dies_, _Vexilla regis prodeunt_, and _Pange lingua gloriosi proelium
certaminis_. The decadence of Latin early in the 7th century is
exemplified by the fantastic grammarian Virgilius Maro, who also
illustrates the transition from Latin to Provencal, and from quantitive
to accentual forms of verse.

While Latin was declining in Gaul, even Greek was not unknown in
Ireland, and the Irish passion for travel led to the spread of Greek
learning in the west of Europe. The Irish monk Columban, shortly before
his death in 615, founded in the neighbourhood of Pavia the monastery of
Bobbio, to be the repository of many Latin MSS. which were ultimately
dispersed among the libraries of Rome, Milan and Turin. About the same
date his fellow-traveller, Gallus, founded above the Lake of Constance
the monastery of St Gallen, where Latin MSS. were preserved until their
recovery in the age of the Renaissance. During the next twenty-five
years Isidore of Seville (d. 636) produced in his _Origines_ an
encyclopaedic work which gathered up for the middle ages much of the
learning of the ancient world.

In Italy a decline in the knowledge of Greek in the 5th and 6th
centuries led to an estrangement between the Greek and Latin Churches.
The year 690 is regarded as the date of the temporary extinction of
Greek in Italy, but, in the first quarters of the 8th and the 9th
centuries, the iconoclastic decrees of the Byzantine emperors drove many
of the Greek monks and their lay adherents to the south of Italy, and
even to Rome itself.

In Ireland we find Greek characters used in the Book of Armagh (_c._
807); and, in the same century, a Greek psalter was copied by an Irish
monk of Liege, named Sedulius (fl. 850), who had a wide knowledge of
Latin literature. In England, some sixty years after the death of
Augustine, the Greek archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore of Tarsus (d.
690) founded a school for the study of Greek, and with the help of an
African monk named Hadrian made many of the English monasteries schools
of Greek and Latin learning, so that, in the time of Bede (d. 735), some
of the scholars who still survived were "as familiar with Greek and
Latin as with their mother-tongue." Among those who had learned their
Greek at Canterbury was Aldhelm (d. 709), "the first Englishman who
cultivated classical learning with any success." While Aldhelm is known
as "the father of Anglo-Latin verse," Latin prose was the literary
medium used by Bede in