nd martyrs, most of them sent from Ireland and England to preach the
Gospel in the dark forests of Germany,--men like St. Gall (died 638), St.
Kilian (died 689), and St. Boniface (died 755), who were not content with
felling the sacred oak-trees and baptizing unconverted multitudes, but
founded missionary stations, and schools, and monasteries; working hard
themselves in order to acquire a knowledge of the language and the
character of the people, and drawing up those curious lists of barbarous
words, with their no less barbarous equivalents in Latin, which we still
possess, though copied by a later hand. He ought to know the gradual
progress of Christianity and civilization in Germany, previous to the time
of Charlemagne; for we see from the German translations of the Rules of
the Benedictine monks, of ancient Latin hymns, the Creeds, the Lord's
Prayer, and portions of the New Testament, that the good sense of the
national clergy had led them to do what Charlemagne had afterwards to
enjoin by repeated Capitularia.(2) It is in the history of German
literature that we learn what Charlemagne really was. Though claimed as a
saint by the Church of Rome, and styled _Empereur Francais_ by modern
French historians, Karl was really and truly a German king, proud, no
doubt, of his Roman subjects, and of his title of Emperor, and anxious to
give to his uncouth Germans the benefit of Italian and English teachers,
but fondly attached in his heart to his own mother tongue, to the lays and
laws of his fatherland: feelings displayed in his own attempt to compose a
German grammar, and in his collection of old national songs, fragments of
which may have been preserved to us in the ballads of Hildebrand and
Hadubrand.

After the death of Charlemagne, and under the reign of the good but weak
King Ludwig, the prospects of a national literature in Germany became
darkened. In one instance, indeed, the king was the patron of a German
poet; for he encouraged the author of the "Heliand" to write that poem for
the benefit of his newly converted countrymen. But he would hardly have
approved of the thoroughly German and almost heathen spirit which pervades
that Saxon epic of the New Testament, and he expressed his disgust at the
old German poems which his great father had taught him in his youth. The
seed, however, which Charlemagne had sown had fallen on healthy soil, and
grew up even without the sunshine of royal favor. The monastery of Fulda,
un