d intellect,
especially such as cultivated the moral and political sciences, and
little inclined to admit them to their favor or to public office. There
is no knowing whether, in our days, with our freedom of thought and of
the press, Charlemagne would have been a stranger to this feeling of
antipathy; but what is certain is, that in his day, in the midst of a
barbaric society, there was no inducement to it, and that, by nature, he
was not disposed to it. His power was not in any respect questioned;
distinguished intellects were very rare; Charlemagne had too much need of
their services to fear their criticisms, and they, on their part, were
more anxious to second his efforts than to show towards him anything like
exaction or independence. He gave rein, therefore, without any
embarrassment or misgiving, to his spontaneous inclination towards them,
their studies, their labors, and their influence. He drew them into the
management of affairs. In Guizot's _History of Civilization in France_
there is a list of the names and works of twenty-three men of the eighth
and ninth centuries who have escaped oblivion, and they are all found
grouped about Charlemagne as his own habitual advisers, or assigned by
him as advisers to his sons Pepin and Louis in Italy and Aquitania, or
sent by him to all points of his empire as his commissioners (_missi
dominici_), or charged in his name with important negotiations. And
those whom he did not employ at a distance formed, in his immediate
neighborhood, a learned and industrious society, a school of the palace,
according to some modern commentators, but an academy, and not a school,
according to others, devoted rather to conversation than to teaching. It
probably fulfilled both missions; it attended Charlemagne at his various
residences, at one time working for him at questions he invited them to
deal with, at another giving to the regular components of his court, to
his children and to himself, lessons in the different sciences called
liberal, grammar, rhetoric, logic, astronomy, geometry, and even theology
and the great religious problems it was beginning to discuss.

[Illustration: Charlemagne presiding at the School of the Palace----246]

Two men, Alcuin and Eginhard, have remained justly celebrated in the
literary history of the age. Alcuin was the principal director of the
school of the palace, and the favorite, the confidant, the learned
adviser of Charlemagne. "If your zeal