tractable, and formed the largest contribution to the _Florilegia_, or
flower-collections, that were circulated by themselves. Horace did not
contain the facile and stimulating tales of Ovid, he was not a Virgil
the story-teller and almost Christian, his lines did not exercise a
strong appeal to the ear, he was not an example of the rhetorical, like
Lucan, his satire did not lend itself, like a Juvenal's, to universal
condemnation of paganism.

In the eighth century, Columban knows Horace, the Venerable Bede cites
him four times, and Alcuin is called a Flaccus. The York catalogue of
Alcuin shows the presence of most of the classic authors. Paul the
Deacon, who wrote a poem in the Sapphics he learned from Horace, is
declared, he says, to be like Homer, Flaccus, and Virgil, but
ungratefully and ungraciously adds, "men like that I'll compare with
dogs." In Spain, Saint Isidore of Seville knew Horace in the seventh
century, though the Rule of Isidore, as of some other monastic
legislators, forbade the use of pagan authors without special
permission; yet the coming of the Arabs in the eighth century, and the
struggle between the Gothic, Christian, and Islamic civilizations
resulted, for the next six or seven centuries, in what seems total
oblivion of the poet.

In the ninth and tenth centuries, under the impulse of the Carolingian
favor, France, in which there is heretofore no evidence of Horace's
presence from the end of Roman times, becomes the greatest center of
manuscript activity, the Bernensis and six Parisian exemplars dating
from this period. Yet the indexes of St. Gall, Reichenau, and Bobbio
contain the name of no work of Horace, and only Nevers and Loesch
contained his complete works. The _Ecbasis Captivi_, an animal-epic
appearing at Toul in 940, has one fifth of its verses formed out of
Horace in the manner of the _cento_, or patchwork. At about the same
time, the famous Hrosvitha of Gandersheim writes her six Christian
dramas patterned after Terence, and in them uses Horace. Mention by
Walter of Speyer, and interest shown by the active monastery on the
Tegernsee, are of the same period. The tenth century is sometimes spoken
of as the Latin Renaissance under the Ottos, the first of whom, called
the Great, crowned Emperor at Rome in 962, welcomed scholars at his
court and made every effort to promote learning.

The momentum of intellectual interest is not lost in the eleventh
century. Paris becomes its most ard