life. The scholar and the educator found within their walls not only
peaceful escape from the harshnesses of political change and military
broil, but the opportunity to labor usefully and unmolested in the
occupation that pleased them most. The cloister became a Christian
institute. The example of Cassiodorus was followed two hundred years
later on a larger scale by Charlemagne. Schools were founded 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 régime
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 Orléans. 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