Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/40

22 had lost its vigour and its wide diffusion in the troubled years that followed the emperor's death. Indeed barely fifteen years had passed since that event, when the prelates of Gaul appealed to Lewis the Pious to carry out the mandate issued by the Roman council, and to save the ruin into which the educational institutions of the country were already falling, We earnestly and humbly petition your highness, they said, that you, following the ensample of your father, will cause public schools to be established in at least three fitting places of your realm, that the labour of your father and yourself may not through neglect (which God forbid) utterly decay and perish: so, they added, shall great benefit and honour abound to God's holy church, and to you a great reward and everlasting remembrance. Still the impulse given to civilisation by the work of Charles, however intermittent its effects may appear, – dying out, as it seemed, by degrees until the second revival of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, – was never wholly lost. Nor was the decline of literature so rapid as is frequently supposed; the change is rather from an initiating to an appropriating age. In the eager life of Charles's day men had leisure for independent study and production: under his successors they were, as a rule, content with a reputation for learning. To be well-read and to reproduce old material, was all that was asked of scholars; and the few who overpassed the conventional