nded both in
cloister and at court, scholars summoned, manuscripts copied, the life
of pagan antiquity studied, and the bond between the languages and
cultures of present and past made firmer. The schools of the old regime
had fallen away in the sixth century, when Northern rule had closed the
civic career to natives of Italy. A great advance in the intellectual
life now laid the foundations of all cultural effort in the Middle Age.

No small part of this advance was due to the preservation of manuscripts
by copying. In this activity France was first, so far as Horace was
concerned. The copies by the scribes of Charlemagne went back to
Mavortius and Porphyrio, the originals of which were probably discovered
at Bobbio by his scholars. Of the two hundred and fifty manuscripts in
existence, the greater part are French in origin, the oldest being the
Bernensis, of the ninth or tenth century, from near Orleans. Germany was
a worthy second to France. The finds in monastery libraries of both
countries in the humanist movement of the fifteenth century were
especially rich. Italy, on the contrary, preserved few manuscripts of
her poet, and none that is really ancient. Italy began the great
monastery movement, but disorder and change were against the diffusion
of culture. Charlemagne's efforts probably had little to do with Italy.
The Church seems to have had no care to preserve the ancient culture of
her native land.

What this meant in terms of actual acquaintance with the poet would not
be clear without evidence of other kinds. By the end of the sixth
century, knowledge of Horace was already vague. He was not read in
Africa, Spain, or Gaul. Read in Italy up to Charlemagne's time, a
hundred years later his works are not to be found in the catalogue of
Bobbio, one of the greatest seats of learning. What the general attitude
of the Church's leadership toward him was, may be conjectured from the
declaration of Gregory the Great against all beauty in writing. Its
general capacity for Horace may perhaps be surmised also from the
confession of the Pope's contemporary, Gregory of Tours, that he is
unfamiliar with the ancient literary languages. The few readers of the
late Empire had become fewer still. The difficult form and matter of the
_Odes_, and their unadaptability to religious and moral use,
disqualified them for the approval of all but the individual scholar or
literary enthusiast. The moralities of the _Epistles_ were more