374 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE the Scot. For a time after the break-up of Charlemagne's Latin leam- empire this state of decline continued and even ingandht- seeme d to grow worse. Then progress becomes the tenth gradually apparent. Some one has figured out eleventh 7 that fewer names of writers have come down to centuries us f rom the tenth than from any other cen- tury between Charlemagne and modern times. In Italy, where cities were first to develop and where we might expect to find the most education, on the contrary well into the eleventh century books were scarce, one had to go a long way to reach a school, and there were many complaints of the ignorance of the lower clergy and against men of no education in high places in the Church. The complaints, however, indicate an awakening intellectual conscience. But knowledge was at a low ebb and what literature there was consisted of barren rhetoric. The Latin poems of the time seem mere exercises in metre and language without feeling and genius. There was still a strong feeling that a Christian ought not to study too deeply in classical litera - t ure and philosophy , and even in the field of theology there was no writing of real importance. North of the Alps names of scholars were scarcer than narratives of miracles in the chronicles of the time. Bruno, Bruno and the brother of Otto the Great, was one of these Hrosvita rare apparitions. His biographer, writing imme- diately after his death, tells us that the chief aim of Bruno's own writing and of his teaching at the palace school was the cultivation of a good Latin style, and that he read the ancient tragedies and comedies through gravely without tears or laughter. "He thought that their meaning was worthless; the style was what he considered all important." A German nun, Hrosvita, who died about the year iooo, not only read the plays of Terence, but composed some dramas herself, the first that have come down to us since Seneca's. Although these seem very stiff and crude to the modern reader, they possessed more plot and human interest than the liturgi c spectacles which were presented about this time by the clergy in cathedrals and monasteries in connection
