enate in 1469, that John of Spira
should print the epistles of Tully and Pliny for five years, and that no
one else should do so. Script. Rerum Italic. t. xxii. p. 1189.

NOTES TO CHAPTER IX.

NOTE I. Page 288.

A rapid decline of learning began in the sixth century, of which Gregory
of Tours is both a witness and an example. It is, therefore, properly
one of the dark ages, more so by much than the eleventh, which concludes
them; since very few were left in the church who possessed any
acquaintance with classical authors, or who wrote with any command of
the Latin language. Their studies, whenever they studied at all, were
almost exclusively theological; and this must be understood as to the
subsequent centuries. By theological is meant the vulgate Scriptures and
some of the Latin fathers; not, however, by reasoning upon them, or
doing much more than introducing them as authority in their own words.
In the seventh century, and still more at the beginning of the eighth,
very little even of this remained in France, where we find hardly a name
deserving of remembrance in a literary sense; but Isidore, and our own
Bede, do honour to Spain and Britain.

It may certainly be said for France and Germany, notwithstanding a
partial interruption in the latter part of the ninth and beginning of
the tenth century, that they were gradually progressive from the time of
Charlemagne. But then this progress was so very slow, and the men in
front of it so little capable of bearing comparison with those of later
times, considering their writings positively and without indulgence,
that it is by no means unjust to call the centuries dark which elapsed
between Charlemagne and the manifest revival of literary pursuits
towards the end of the eleventh century. Alcuin, for example, has left
us a good deal of poetry. This is superior to what we find in some other
writers of the obscure period, and indicates both a correct ear and a
familiarity with the Latin poets, especially Ovid. Still his verses are
not as good as those which schoolboys of fourteen now produce, either in
poetical power or in accuracy of language and metre. The errors indeed
are innumerable. Aldhelm, an earlier Anglo-Saxon poet, with more
imaginative spirit, is further removed from classical poetry. Lupus,
abbot of Ferrieres, early in the ninth century, in some of his epistles
writes tolerable Latin, though this is far from being always the case;
he is smitten with a