The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

O LUX BEATA TRINITAS.

O blessed light, the Trinity,

In Unity of primal love—

Now that the burning sun has gone,

Our hearts illumine from above.

Thee, in the morn with songs of praise,

Thee, at the evening time, we seek;

Thee, through all ages we adore,

And, suppliant of thy love, we speak.

To God the Father be the praise,

And to his sole-begotten Son,

And to the Blessed Comforter,

Both now and while all time shall run.

The closing scenes in the life of the great bishop were such as became his past. His funeral address over his brother Satyrus is like that of Bernard over his brother Gerard, or like that of Melanchthon above the dead Luther. His eulogy of Theodosius, whom he survived but two years, is conceived in a strain of lofty poetry, several paragraphs opening with the repeated phrase Dilexi virum illum. I loved that man!

Ambrose died on the night after Good Friday, A.D. 397. Paulinus, his biographer, was taking notes of the commentary pronounced by his dying master on the 43d psalm. It was a scene like that at the deathbed of the Venerable Bede. The failing bishop said that he heard angelic voices and saw the smiling face of Christ; and the reverent scribe avows that the face which looked on his own was bright, and that around that aged head shone until the very last an aureole of glory.

Let us allow much charity to the miracles and to the superstition of that time, but let us also remember the gravity and sweetness of the poet-bishop. For it is no wonder that when he lay in state in the great cathedral with quiet, upturned face, little children were moved by his gentle dignity of countenance and men and women, affected by this holy presence, put away their sins, and were baptized as followers of the dead man’s faith.

CHAPTER VI.
PRUDENTIUS THE FIRST CHRISTIAN POET.

Aurelius Prudentius Clemens has received rather more than his due share of renown. His works have been edited by the most careful scholars. There is a beautiful little “Elzevir” upon which Heinsius expended his labor and which was printed at Amsterdam in 1667. There is an “Aldine,” 4to, Venice, 1501. But the most elegant is that of Parma (1788, 2 vols., 4to), edited by Teoli; and the best is regarded as that of Faustinus Arevalus, the Spaniard, Rome 1788-89, also in 2 vols. 4to. If to these we add the most accessible collection of his writings, we shall find it in the fifty-ninth and sixtieth volumes of Migne’s Patrologia. The text of these various editions is derived from what is called the Codex Puteanus, now in the Paris Library—a manuscript dating into the fifth or sixth century. In all, there have been nearly a dozen of them, of which that of R. Langius (1490, 4to) is the true princeps—the very earliest. And in the matter of editorship, it is worthy of note that Erasmus did not disdain to expend his fine classical skill upon the hymns for Christmas and the Epiphany.

If we ask Bentley his opinion of Prudentius he tells us that he is “the Horace and Virgil of the Christians.” Milman declares that he was “the great popular author of the Middle Ages,” and that “no work but the Bible appears with so many glosses [commentaries] in High German.” “T. D.,” away back in 1821, when dear old Kit North was editing Blackwood, furnished that periodical with some poetical translations and remarked that Prudentius was “the Latin Dr. Watts.” In La Rousse he obtains the credit of being “the first Christian poet.” Among the earlier contemporaneous, or slightly subsequent references his name is preceded by the magic letters, “V. C.,” standing not, as some have thought, for Vir Consularis, a man who had enjoyed the consulship, but for Vir Clarissimus, a person of high distinction. It is reserved for the “worthy and impartial” Du Pin to formulate a judgment more in accord with the true facts of the case. “Prudentius,” saith Du Pin, “is no very good poet, he often useth expressions not reconcilable to the purity of Augustus’s Age.”

The value of his poetry turns largely upon its theological and historical merits—both of which are considerable. It is not structurally perfect by any means, and yet it has furnished several very lovely hymns to the Church—graceful and delicate, rather than strong or inspiring.

In giving him his name it is safe to take that which is usually adopted: Aurelius Prudentius, surnamed Clemens or the Merciful. To this has occasionally been prefixed Quintus or Marcus, but neither has sufficient authority in its favor. He was a Spaniard, and the main facts concerning his life are learned from his own metrical preface to his poems. Probably few questions have been more closely discussed by the learned than this of his birthplace. The internal evidence is heaped up on either side until it is seen that Calahorra [Calagurris] is probably where he was born, while Saragossa [Caesarea-Augusta] was “his city” and the place with which he was most identified.

He was doubtless of good family. Those industrious and microscopic editors who have devoted themselves to his fame have laid great stress upon the names Aurelius and Clemens. The Aurelii, they say, were distinguished and well-born people. The Clementes were also of notable memory. And there were two Prudentii beside himself who obtained rather more than ordinary distinction. Indeed, there were some five Prudentii, early and late, and one of them, Prudentius Amoenus, tried, indifferently badly, to climb to fame by an abridgment of his predecessor’s history of the Old and New Testaments. In this he was so successful that the original is now lost, the condensation alone remains, and our Prudentius is often known as Prudentius Major, to differentiate him from this troublesome Minor, who was a preceptor of Walafrid Strabo. In regard to two other hymns—the Corde natus and the Vidit anguis—an element of doubt has been introduced by this same person. Faustinus Arevalus was nothing if not a hymn-tinker (see Christian Remembrancer, vol. xlvi., p. 125 ff.), and it is possible that these by such careless editorship have been incorporated into the text of the true Prudentius from the pages of his namesake and imitator. The hymn Virgo Dei genitrix (of the fifteenth century) is ascribed to another of the five Prudentii.

This sort of blunder is by no means unusual. We have an instance in point with reference to the very Consul Salia in whose consulship our poet tells us that he was born. A similarity between Coss. Salia and Massalia misled the learned. They saw in this a proof that Massilia (Marseilles) was his birthplace, and Prudentius was at once claimed for France. But we have now unravelled and disentangled the greater part of this obscure coil. Flavius Philippus and Flavius Salia are known to have served conjointly in the year 348, and hence the industry of Aldus Manutius and Labbeus (Labbèe) has been thrown away and their false conjecture has been abandoned.

Prudentius himself tells us nothing about his family, beyond what we derive by inference. The deeper that we plunge into this labyrinth of guesses the further we are from being settled in opinion. The exhaustive—and, let us add, the exhausting—editor of the latest edition finally calls a halt in the middle of his complicated Latin sentences and avows himself utterly at a loss about the truth. There is then some comfort left to us in cutting and untying these knots; for whatever view we may advance has found distinguished and earnest championship already! On the whole, Teoli appears a reliable leader, and him we have mostly followed, as later authors, such as Professors Fiske and Teuffel, seem to have done before us.

Let us say, then, that he was born in 348, Philippus and Salia being consuls, at Calahorra, which lies up the Ebro and to the northwest of Saragossa. To-day Calahorra is a small place of a few thousand inhabitants, but it furnishes two other notable facts to history in addition to its claim to be the birthplace of Prudentius. It was this little fighting town which resisted Afranius, whom Pompey sent to take it in 78 B.C., and it was then that the citizens ate their wives and children sooner than surrender. Besides this somewhat doubtful glory it produced Quinctilian; while Tudela, which is between it and Saragossa, gave a name to the learned Jew, Benjamin of Tudela, whose ideas about the Tower of Babel have become as classic as Prudentius’s hymns or as the Maid of Saragossa herself. It may be added that paganism was very early abandoned in all this region.

The parents of Prudentius gave him a good education. He possessed, says Teoli, ingenium acre, disertum, ferax—talent that was keen, eloquent, and fruitful. But at the rhetoricians’ schools, which he attended about the age of seventeen, he found little that was commendable in manners or morals. It would appear that he gave the rein to his vices and that his life was not very rapidly turned into the ways of Christianity.

He was at first called to the bar and made judge in two towns of considerable size, which may perhaps have been Toledo and Cordova. About the year 400 he is supposed to have gone to Rome and to have been favorably received by Honorius the Emperor, who then promoted him to some sort of honorable office in his native country. At fifty-seven years of age, as he himself tells us, he began to cultivate literature. He had retired from active life, much as Chaucer did in later days. From this period onward he lived in quiet; he “fled fro’ the presse and dwelt in soothfastnesse,” like the father of English verse. He gave himself to sacred things—to hymns in honor of God and of the saints, and to poems against paganism and in favor of Christian duty.

His poems have Greek titles. First comes the Psychomachia (the Battles of the Soul)—in hexameter—treating of the conflict in a Christian soul between virtue and vice. The contrasts are arranged somewhat like those of Plutarch between the Greek and Roman leaders, only, of course, the antithesis is decidedly against the vices. Here stand Faith opposed to Idolatry, and Chastity facing Impurity, and Patience resisting Anger, and Humility contrasted with Pride, and Sobriety pre-eminent over Excess, and Liberality vanquishing Covetousness, and Concord healing the wounds caused by Dissension. There are nine hundred and fifteen lines in the poem.

The Peristephanon (Concerning Crowns) has twelve hymns in honor of various martyrs. Mr. Simcox notes that these are almost idyllic in form, and that there is much made of the white dove which flies from the burning pile about St. Eulalia and of the violets which the girls should bring to the tombs of the virgin martyrs. It may be interesting to name the martyrs thus celebrated. There were two from Calahorra; then Laurentius and Eulalia; eighteen who suffered at Saragossa; Vincentius, and finally Fructuosus and Quirinus, bishops both.

Then comes a poem on the Baptistery at Calahorra (translated in Blackwood, vol. ix., p. 192), with a description of the deaths of Cassian, Romanus, Hippolytus, Peter and Paul the apostles, Cyprian and Agnes. These poems, it should be said, are various in metre and some are quite long.

The Cathemerinon (a Book of Hours) is the real mine whence the most of the hymns which were composed by Prudentius are taken. In this we have hymns for cock-crowing and morning; before and after food; at the lighting of the lamp; and before retiring to rest. With these are joined others for the use of those who are fasting, and at the conclusion of the fast; for all hours and at the burial of the dead; the work ending with hymns for Christmas and Epiphany.

The Apotheosis consists of poems relating to the errors of all the heretics that can be named—Patripassians, Arians, Sabellians, Manichaeans, Docetae, etc. The value of this to ecclesiastical history is easily perceived. It has more than a thousand hexameters and it treats additionally of the nature of the soul and of sin and of the resurrection.

The Hamartigenia (the Origin of Evil) takes up original sin as against Marcion; and the Dittochaeon (which possibly means Double Food) is the abridgment of Old and New Testaments. This last is a sort of religious picture gallery ranging from Adam to the Apocalypse in hexametrical epigrams. There is reason to doubt whether it be what Prudentius originally composed. If he followed his usual vein of abundant verse, there is no question but that these half a hundred epigrams would be more popular than his very extensive poetical treatment of such subjects.

It is left us to mention the two books against Symmachus, the Roman senator, whom Ambrose so earnestly and successfully opposed. Symmachus had purposed to restore the idols, revive the revenues of the pagan temples, and generally to cast out Christianity from Rome. The poetry of Prudentius is again valuable here, for it plunges into the origin and baseness of idolatry, describing the conversion of Rome, and presenting a picture of the times which is invaluable to the historian. It is from the pages of Prudentius that we learn the cruelty of the purest of the Roman women, when

“The modest vestal, with her down-turned thumb

Urges the gladiator to his stroke

Lest life may lurk in any vital place!”

One line in our author’s hymn in honor of St. Lawrence preserves an historical fact which was not appreciated in its full significance until our own times. He says, Aedemque Laurenti tuam Vestalis intrat Claudia—“Claudia, the Vestal Virgin, enters Thy House.” In 1883 there was discovered in the Atrium of the Vestals a pedestal of a statue dedicated to one of the heads of the order, from which her name had been effaced purposely. Nothing of it was left except the initial C., while there still remained the praise of “her chastity and her profound knowledge in religious matters” (Ob meritvm Castitatis Pvdicitiae adq. in Sacris Religionibusqve Doctrinae Mirabilis). The statue was erected in the year 364, and the order was abolished by the younger Theodosius in 394, so that her conversion must have taken place between those two dates. The conversion of a person filling a place of such high honor in pagan eyes, of a Vestalis maxima, must have been a severe blow to the pagan party, which in Rome was making a fierce but hopeless fight for the old worship. Yet we find no other reference to it in literature, unless the letter of Symmachus to a Vestal, of whom he had heard that she meant to withdraw from her order, was addressed to Claudia. See Professor Lanciani’s Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries, pp. 170-72 (Boston, 1888).

It is uncertain in what year or in what part of Spain Prudentius died. Conjecture varies between 410 and 424 A.D. This infinitude of filmy particulars causes one to feel as if he were walking through spider-webs of a morning in the country. This hard, practical nineteenth century only experiences a sense of annoyance as it encounters the elaborate nothings of that strangely laborious, all-gathering scholarship which prevailed in the sixteenth and seventeenth. To create any intensity of interest to-day requires an imagination which would sacrifice truth to attractiveness.

But certainly, from what we can see of the man in his works, we can have no hesitation in pronouncing a verdict highly favorable both to his poetry and his piety. As governor of important towns he merited—or he would scarcely have received—his title of “the Merciful.” As a close observer of his time and a student of its thought, he has preserved for us what we cannot spare. It is he who in the Jam moesta quiesce querela struck the first notes which were to vibrate in the Dies irae. It is he again who in the Ales die nuntius anticipated Henry Vaughan and his

“Father of lights, what sunny seed,

What glance of day hast thou confined

Into this bird!”

The hymn is as follows:

“The bird, the messenger of day,

Cries the approaching light;

And thus doth Christ, who calleth us

Our minds to life excite.

“Bear off, he cries, these beds of ease

Where lie the sick and dumb;

And let the chaste and pure and true

Watch, for I quickly come.

“We haste to Jesus at his word,

Earnest to pray and weep,

Such fervent supplication still

Forbids pure hearts to sleep.

“Disturb our dream, thou holy Christ,

Break off the night’s dark chain;

Forgive us all our sin of old,

And grant us light again.”

And so it is still he who casts the ray of his fancy upon Bethlehem and upon the Transfigured Christ. Here is the Quicumque Christum quaeritis in proof of his real genius:

“O ye who seek your Lord to-day,

Lift up your eyes on high,

And view him there, as now ye may,

Whose brightness cannot die.

“How gloriously it shineth on

As though it knew no dearth:

Sublime and lofty, never done,

Older than heaven and earth.

“Thou art the very King of men,

Thy people Israel’s King,

Promised unto our fathers when

From Abraham all should spring.

“To thee the prophets testified,

In thee their hearts rejoice—

Our Father bids us seek thy side

To hear and heed thy voice.”

I have changed the two last stanzas into the second person instead of the third. Otherwise the rendering is a faithful and literal version of the hymn. This, then, is a good proof of the genuine ring of true metal to be found in Prudentius.

The variety and flexibility of his measures, in spite of archaic or post-classical words and phrases, deserves our highest praise. He is a writer of the “Brazen Age,” but he has not sunk far from the “Silver,” nor exactly into the falchion sweep of the more brutal “Iron” time.

Here is another of his hymns, the Nox et tenebrae et nubila, which has obtained a place in the Roman Breviary:

“Night, clouds and darkness, get you gone!

Depart, confusions of the earth!

Light comes; the sky so dark and wan

Brightens—it is the Saviour’s birth!

“The gloom of earth is cleft in twain

Struck by that sudden, solar ray;

Color and life return again

Before the shining face of day.

“Thee, Christ, alone we seek to know,

Thee, pure in mind, and plain in speech;

We seek thee in our worship, so

That thou canst through our senses teach.

“How many are the dreams of dread

Which by thy light are swept apart!

Thou, Saviour of the sainted dead,

Shine with calm lustre in the heart!”

The same leading idea of the analogy of the natural light with the spiritual runs through the following:

“Lo the golden light appears,

Lo the darkness pales away

Which has plunged us long in fears,

Wandering in a devious way.

“Now the light brings peace at last,

Holds us purely as its own;

All our doubts aside are cast,

And we speak with holy tone.

“So may all the day run on

Free from sin of hand or tongue,

And our very glances shun

Every form and shape of wrong.

“High above us One is set

All our days to know and mark,

And our acts he watches yet

From the dawning to the dark.”

Prudentius undoubtedly exhibits the early traces of observances which are peculiar to the Roman Catholic Church. In one of his hymns (the Cultor Dei memento) he advises that the sign of the cross be made upon the forehead and above the heart:

“Frontem locumque cordis

Crucis figura signet.”

But we have not the space, nor is this the proper occasion, to follow him through those matters which belong to the church historian more than to the hymnologist. We must leave him to end his days in undisturbed quiet, a good deal after the manner of Chaucer, as indeed we have already hinted. He is said to have died in the neighborhood of the year 405 in Spain. Our information is largely conjectural and affords us no certainty about his closing years.

That a poet who still dwelt amid the sculptured coldness of the pagan past should have written such hymns, is a proof of what Christianity was then achieving. She had banished from the chilly apartments of literature the ancient focus with its feeble charcoal and its mephitic smoke. Instead of this she had created the cheerful hearth, on which a pure fire of devotion was kindled and whose ascending flame swept off the immoral vapors of the time. Prudentius, in a word, made scholarship and religion companions instead of enemies; and brightened classic prosody by the presence of a living faith.

To Prudentius also more hymns have been ascribed than he ever wrote, but after these have been weeded out, there are left:

Ales diei nuntius, Nox et tenebrae et nubila, Sol ecce surgit igneus, Intende nostris sensibus, O crucifer bone, lucisator, Pastis visceribus, ciboque sumpto, Inventor rutili dux bone luminis, Ades pater supreme, Cultor Dei memento, O Nazarene lux Bethlem verbum Patris, In Ninivitas se coactus percito, Christe servorum regimen tuorum, Da puer plectrum, Corde natus ex parentis, Deus ignee fons animarum, Jam moesta quiesce querela, Quid est quod arctum circulum, Quicumque Christum quaeritis, O sola magnarum urbium, Audit tyrannus anxius, Salvete flores martyrum, Qui ter quaternus denique, Felix terra quae Fructuoso vestiris, Lux ecce surgit aurea, En martyris Laurentii, Beate martyr prospera, Noctis terrae primordia, Obsidionis obvias, Hymnum Mariae Virginis, Germine nobilis Eulalia, Scripta sunt coelo duorum, Innumeros cineres sanctorum.

CHAPTER VII.
ENNODIUS, BISHOP OF PAVIA.

Rambach says, in his Anthology, that none of the hymns of Ennodius have been adopted by the Church. “Nor have I,” adds Daniel, “found in any breviary a verse of Ennodius. Yet,” he continues, “since there are many of them in the collection of Thomasius, which have been taken from the Mozarabic Breviary, it seems to me certain that in some countries they were formerly employed by the Church.” Some corruption has also taken place in the text. And, in short, these hymns have never appeared either devout or original enough to secure the suffrages of the faithful.

The reason for their emptiness is not far to seek. Their author was a man of great celebrity but of little piety. His reputation, too, is that of an ardent ecclesiast, who managed to climb the heights of saintship by working in the interest of the Roman pontiff. He labored to maintain the supremacy of the Pope—upon whom, it is said, on good authority, that he was the first to bestow the world-wide appellation of Papa (Pope)—and to effect the union under this one religious head of both Greek and Roman churches. To this single cause, with its double aspect, Ennodius gave his talents and his zeal. He was so far successful that he gained honor and position for himself, however he was prospered in his other plans.

He was a person of sufficient prominence for Italy and Gaul to contest the honor of his birth. It would appear, however, that Gaul has the best title to whatever credit his nationality may give. The works on hymnology do not mention him, and the only notices of his life and writings are to be found in out-of-the-way corners of books on Latin literature and in the controversial pages of Church historians. Those who attack and those who defend the papal claims, are in the habit of mentioning the two embassies of Ennodius as notable points in their argument; but the man is lost from sight in the paramount importance of his mission. It cannot be so with us, to whom his personal character is the topic of interest, and who care only for his circumstances as these develop him to us upon his hymnologic side.

Ennodius has himself informed us that he regarded Arles as his native place. We also know that he was born in 473, because he died in 521 at the age of forty-eight. His family was highly respectable, if, indeed, it was not actually illustrious. Our poet always shows a familiarity with the affairs of good society; and in those times good society had only one meaning. It was a society which educated its scions in the polite learning of Greece and Rome, and which made much of the ability to speak and write the Latin tongue. It is scarcely to be questioned that this was the theory on which the early education of Ennodius proceeded. He was sent to Milan in order to become versed in what was called humane learning. If he is himself to be believed he acquired both bad and good in this school. He laments with a mock humility (for so it would appear by his later literary derelictions) that he had obtained a great deal of wicked and ungodly information; and really no one can read some of his nasty epigrams and doubt his assertion. For, whether it was permissible to a saint or not, it is a fact, that the editors of his works have not scrupled to print some exceedingly profane and improper pieces which are undoubtedly the product of his pen.

His aunt, who was bearing the cost of this admirable instruction, died in 489—that is, when he was sixteen—and he was left without means to proceed with his studies. He avows that he had come to detest the very name of liberal education, and this, under the circumstances, cannot well be regarded as anything very surprising. We soon after find him married to a lady who is described as of a “most noble” and therefore highly appropriate family. She was, moreover, “very rich”—another satisfactory point. With this wealthy and fashionable wife, Ennodius rapidly obtained a view of earth, and what earth can give, which was so far limited in that the money did not equal the desires of the married pair. It ran low and the bitterness of financial perplexities mingled with the cup of their happiness. Judging the husband by his epigrams he was pretty fairly exhausted by the speed of their career, and was quite ready to shake off the encumbrance of a family and devote himself to the lofty purpose of being supported by somebody else. An unprejudiced mind fails to see in this any particular “admonition” or “example” to his age. It is merely the selfish escape of a worldly but embarrassed man. Divorces were not available then with the ease with which a less scrupulous and more intellectual generation can now procure them. The proper, and, indeed, the meritorious way, was to slip into a cloister and become one of that vast army which was soon to be the tower of strength of the Pope. He himself ascribes this step to a serious illness in which he had been healed through the miraculous interposition of St. Victor, after the doctors had given up his case.

Ennodius now attached himself to the person and fortunes of Epiphanius, the Bishop of Pavia. He was placed under the tutelage of one Servilio, who taught him theology according to the methods and opinions then in vogue. His wife meanwhile had made the best of it after the same fashion, and had gone into a convent, where all trace of her vanishes in that monotone of gray walls, chanted services, and ceaseless devotion. At least no individuality resembling her ever henceforth emerges from that uniform procession which passes by us, in this and later centuries, as the long line of hooded figures moves athwart Dante and Virgil in the “Purgatorio.”

But the career of Ennodius now begins. He is the bishop’s chosen companion, the associate of his expedition to Briançon in Burgundy in behalf of certain prisoners; for in those days the spiritual hand was often laid with a mighty grip on the secular arm. The poet was by this time a deacon, having been ordained thereto by his kind friend the bishop. And the duties of this private secretaryship were so pleasant that it is evident no one would willingly surrender them for a cold cell and matins early in the morning. The glimpses which we get of Ennodius do not encourage us to esteem him an ascetic, or to think him lacking in zeal for personal comfort. He was the literary adjunct of a remarkably amiable prelate, with whom he was on terms of intimacy which made his own life no care at all, and his meat and drink no problem whatever! From 494, then, he continued still to occupy this post of trust and ease. We are told that the bishop persuaded him to it, but there can be no reasonable objection to our believing that the bishop had no unwilling listener.

The literary capacity of Ennodius next attracts attention. His patron (who must not be confused with the great Bishop of Salamis, the author of the famous Heresies, who belongs to the previous century) died before 510. Maximus III. had succeeded Epiphanius, and after his death our Ennodius, in 510 or 511, was selected for the vacant diocese. The name of this episcopate was Ticinum, or, as we now style it, Pavia. It is plain that the bestowal of this dignity was hastened by the fact that our scholar while still a deacon had defended Pope Symmachus before the Roman synod called “Palmare,” and so effectually that the discourse was entered on the acts of the council, where it still appears. The Pope had been charged with crimes, and a synod convoked by the heretical Theodoric was to decide the case. The date was October, 501. The place was a portico of the church of St. Peter at Rome to which this name of Palmare was usually given. And the speech is historic inasmuch as it is the earliest recorded instance of that assertion of supremacy on the part of the Roman pontiff which frees him from any responsibility to earthly rulers. Ennodius thus became the advocate of this dogma, and upon the broad wings of papal favor he soared to the high station which his patron Epiphanius had quitted.

This burst of declamatory eloquence did not come without preparatory training. Ennodius had been exercised in the art of declamation in his youthful days and, as a deacon, he was able to utilize his knowledge. In 510 or 511, not long after his elevation to the mitre, he wrote the life of his friend and predecessor. And this he followed with divers performances of a literary character which were generously applauded. He became a sort of hero in the world of letters, and whatever he was pleased to compose was heartily commended.

In 515 it was natural that such an advocate of the absolute domination of the Roman pontiff should be selected to help in the effort to reunite the Eastern Church to the Western. The ambassadors were himself, the Bishop of Pavia; Fortunatus, Bishop of Catania; Venantius, a presbyter; Vitalis, a deacon, and Hilarius, a notary and scribe. These names themselves reveal a not infrequent source of confusion to students of that distressingly barren period, when it was regarded as a very pleasant compliment to call the son of a nobody by the distinguished appellation of some great person in the Church. In this manner Hilary and Fortunatus suffered then, and modern scholars have been often vexed and perplexed since, especially when dates come near together. It hardly needs to be added that these wearers of illustrious names have only that meed of renown, such as it is.

The purpose of the embassy was to obtain from the Byzantine Emperor Anastasius, at that time a man of great age, the recognition of Hormisdas, the ruling Pope, as the supreme religious head of both empires. It was a delicate negotiation, and it demanded a perfectly incorruptible adherence to the interests of Rome. In this respect Ennodius stood pre-eminent as what Mosheim styles an “infatuated adulator of the Roman pontiff,” and as a master of the style then required in a diplomat. He had (in 503) eulogized Pope Symmachus, calling him “one who judged in the place of God” (vice Dei judicare) and again (in 507) he had published a panegyric on Theodoric, the Gothic King of Italy, which had all the absurd flattery of that species of composition. To crown these he was the obedient occupant of the see of Pavia. He was therefore just the man to do the work of the relentless and uncompromising Pope.

Caelius Hormisdas was a man who never yielded, never forgot, and never relaxed a purpose. Such men, backed by a sufficient power, wring from a reluctant world about all that they have determined to secure. But to the obstinate will of the Pope was opposed the no less obstinate will of the old Emperor—now fully eighty-five years of age—and quite as grim in his methods as any Hormisdas. It was to be a battle of giants and the intermediates might look for little favor. The opportunity for the negotiation itself happened to occur in an unusual way. Vitalianus, commander of the Imperial Byzantine cavalry, had taken arms against the Emperor; had defeated and put to death Cyril, the opposing general, and had then marched to the very gates of Constantinople. The victor was proposing to color his rebellion by a pleasant pretext of helping the orthodox; and the old Emperor, therefore, turned the edge of his own humiliation by agreeing to a correspondence with the Pope.

Anastasius began to carry out his share of this unpleasant business by appointing a council to meet at Heraclea, in Thrace, on July 15th, 515, and asking for commissioners to be sent from Rome. The venerable fox knew perfectly well that he had not allowed time enough for the proper instruction of these delegates, nor for them to make the long journey. But Pope Hormisdas appointed them, and they proceeded to the imperial court, utterly indifferent as to the time of the council, and without any apologies for their delay which history deigns to record. They went, indeed, in a very haughty spirit, and did not even commence their expedition before August 12th.

When they reached the Emperor they asked, or rather demanded, that he should assent to the letter of Pope Leo, who was the first to claim this submission from the East. They insisted, furthermore, that this heterodox monarch should accept the definitions of the famous Council of Chalcedon, A.D. 451, which relate to the nature and personality of Christ. The schism between East and West had now lasted for thirty-one years, and a certain Acacius, Bishop of Constantinople, who had been a most persistent opponent of the demands of Leo the Great, was still a thorn in the Roman pontiff’s side.

But Anastasius received the ambassadors with just as proud a spirit as they had shown to him. He would neither yield to Leo nor to Chalcedon, nor would he anathematize Acacius. Ennodius and his companions returned to Rome without accomplishing their mission, and the Emperor sent letters after them by Theopompus and Severianus, principal men of his court. When these reached Rome they were badly received by Hormisdas, and found that nothing would answer except the excommunication of Acacius. With this ultimatum they got back, somewhat crestfallen; and poor Acacius (who was not half so bad as his papal foe) was once more threatened with banishment to eternal fires.

Anastasius, however, was not at all inclined to hand over his bishop to the mercies of Hormisdas. He stoutly refused and continued to refuse throughout the ensuing correspondence. About two hundred monks and archimandrites (heads of monasteries) sent from Syria a letter to the Pope which was directed against the patriarch of Antioch, Severus by name, and which gave in their own allegiance to the Western Church. Nevertheless, the Emperor still maintained the cause of Acacius, although he must have seen that the Pope was as determined as ever to carry his point and that there was now a great deal which was working in favor of the papal plans. When the Syrians addressed their letter to the “Most holy and blessed Hormisdas, Patriarch of the whole earth, holding the see of Peter the prince of the apostles,” it spoke volumes for what the Pope had been able to effect by his agents and representations in the East. But the Emperor would not yield the point and act upon the conciliatory policy of the heretical Theodoric of Italy, which was that they might settle religious matters in their own fashion, provided they honored absolutely his temporal sway.

A second embassy was set on foot consisting of Ennodius and Peregrinus, Bishop of Misenum. By these ambassadors letters were sent renewing the old conditions and avowing that nothing would be satisfactory short of the complete banishment of that pestilent wretch Acacius. This was too much for the Emperor to bear. He angrily dismissed the legates, shipping them off in an old and leaky vessel, and giving a special order to Demetrius and Heliodorus to see that they did not set foot in his dominions after they had once sailed for home. Behind the flying ambassadors followed a document which expressed the royal mind with force and vigor. After comparing the conduct of the Pope very unfavorably with that of Jesus Christ, the Emperor proceeds to say: “We shall give you no further trouble, it being in vain for us to pray or entreat you, since you are obstinately determined not to hearken to our prayers and entreaties. We can bear to be despised and affronted, but we will not be commanded.”

This was dated July 11th, 517, and reveals an unexpected dignity in the old Emperor, and it makes us glad to record that, while he lived, the Bishop of Constantinople was at least preserved in a salvable state.

But when Anastasius died, then Hormisdas began again upon Justin, his successor, and never stopped until Acacius was struck from the roll of bishops and until the East acknowledged the spiritual supremacy of the West. That the victory was of no long continuance or of any enormous value, does not prevent us from noticing that it gave to Magnus Felix Ennodius his permanent place in the Roman calendar, and did everything for his literary and ecclesiastical comfort. He was well rewarded for his devotion to the cause.

Anastasius reigned 491-518, and Hormisdas, who had once been married and had a son, who also became Pope, ruled in his sphere from 514 to 523. Thus he had nearly five years wherein to rejoice over his obstinate dead enemy. And Ennodius possessed his soul in peace and turned his attention once more to polite literature.

Of the writings which he has left to us, the principal are the life of Epiphanius; another of Antonius of Pannonia, a hermit at Lake Como and then a monk at Lerins; together with a Eucharisticum de Vita sua and the apology and panegyric mentioned above. Add to these nine books of letters, “weighed down with emptiness,” and various itineraries, declamations, and poetical pieces, and you have all he did. The letters are most unsatisfactory when we remember that he was the friend, and perhaps the relative, of men like Boethius, Faustus, Avienus, Caesar of Arles, Aurelian, and of bishops and other prelates without number, and lived in Italy under the great Theodoric. He is utterly lacking in contemporary portraits, and his accounts of his three journeys give us nothing valuable. All is stilted, unnatural, and dull. He was not much of a traveller at best. A trip into Burgundy, another across the Po to see his sister, and one from Rome by sea, make up the list of which he kept any trace in his writings. He is in no haste to detail the sayings and doings at Constantinople! But it should be said that these performances with the pen were previous to his elevation to the mitre. Afterward he doubtless composed only hymns and epigrams—the hymns being decent and the epigrams very much the reverse. The German scholar Teuffel looks upon his productions as an “important source of history” for some enigmatic reason of his own, but Simcox very justly scouts them; and the Romanist Berington asserts that he rises “with weariness” from their perusal. I must personally declare that they exhibit neither skill, taste, nor information. They are jejune and empty to a marvellous degree; and for complication of sentences and unclassical phraseology, they are equal to the stupidest books of a later day. And nothing worse than this can be said by any critic.

The Eucharisticum is an insincere sort of thanksgiving for his restoration to health, and very far behind the style of Augustine which it copies. It gives us a few particulars of his personal history, but it is prosaic and Pharisaic, and full of a mock humble glorification of the blessed Victor the Martyr, by whose intercession he is now convalescent.

The hymns are a trifle more hopeful, and really merit our notice. They are by no means the “dozen tame hymns” of which Simcox speaks so contemptuously. There are sixteen of them and three are quite good. Here, for instance, is the Christe lumen perpetuum:

“O Christ, the eternal light

Of every sun and sphere,

Illumine thou our mortal night

And keep our spirits clear.

“Let nothing evil smite,

Nor enemy invade;

And let us stainless be, and white,

By nothing base betrayed.

“Guard thou the hearts of all,

But chiefly of thine own;

And hold us, that we may not fall,

Through thy great might alone.

“That so our souls may sing,

When favoring light they see;

And every vow and tribute bring

To God in Trinity.”

The Christe precamur is quite as good:

“To thee O Christ we ever pray

And blend our prayer with tears;

Thou pure and holy One, alway

Protect our night of years!

“Our hearts shall be at rest in thee;

In sleep they dream thy praise,

And to thy glory, faithfully,

They hail the coming days.

“Give us a life that shall not fail;

Refresh our spirits then;

Let blackest night before thee pale,

And bring thy light to men!

“Our vows in song we pay thee still,

And, at the evening hour,

May all that we have purposed ill

Be right through sovereign power!”

There is yet one more hymn which seems worthy of a place in our regard. It is the Christe salvator omnium:

“O Christ, the Saviour of all,

Thou Lord of the heavens above;

We ask thy glorious aid

Before the day shall remove.

“The sun is hastening down;

His light is sunk in the west;

He hideth the world in gloom,

According to God’s behest.

“Do thou, most excellent Lord,

As we thy followers pray,

To us, all weary with toil,

Grant quiet night on our way.

“That day, from our darkening hearts,

May never withdraw her light;

But, safe in thy guardian grace,

Thy love illumine our night.”

The poetical and spiritual range of these lyrics is not extensive, of course, but it is a vast improvement on those “uncleanly imitations of Martial,” or such involved and heartless tricks of verse as he sometimes essays. But he became a saint, and that must suffice! His life has been written by Sirmond; and his times and life together have occupied the attention of Fertig (Passau, 1855). He died at Padua, as we are credibly informed, on July 17th (XVI. Kal. Aug.), 521, and this date is assigned to him in the Roman Catholic calendar of saints. His epitaph, according to Despont, who wrote in 1677, was still to be found in the church of St. Michael, and testimonies to his services are among the acts of the Fifth Synod of Rome, and are included in the public papers of Hormisdas.

When you break open the important historical facts with which he was identified, then like the toad from the stone, comes forth Ennodius. And like that toad, though “ugly and venomous,” he yet “wears a precious jewel in his head.”

CHAPTER VIII.
CAELIUS SEDULIUS AND HIS ALPHABET HYMN.

Latin hymnology gives a distinguished place to a hymn of twenty-three stanzas, each stanza containing four lines and beginning with a letter of the alphabet in regular order. Thus from A to Z all the letters appear except J, U, and W. Caterva is spelled Katerva, to answer for K. Y is represented by Ymnis, which is another form of Hymnis. And at last Zelum concludes the list. The author struggles with a difficulty when he takes Xeromyrrham to answer for X, but otherwise the ideas and versification are so excellent as to have made the hymn classic. The Roman Breviary uses two selections from it. One commences A solis ortus cardine, ad usque, and the other, Hostis Herodes impie. The general subject is the Nativity, but the poem soon proceeds to the Miracles of our Lord, and closes with an ascription of praise for His Resurrection.

There can be no doubt about the authorship. Old manuscript codices, and the tradition of the Church, assign it definitely to Caelius Sedulius—sometimes called Caius Caelius Sedulius—who flourished near the middle of the fifth century. But his personal history is much harder to come at, and the few facts which we possess only stimulate our curiosity to know more. And besides, he is so entangled with another Sedulius—also a poet, also a celebrated author, also a Scot, and also involved in much obscurity—that nearly every notice of his name contains more or less of error. This second Sedulius, however, wrote no hymn which has survived, and therefore needs no further mention. He is always named Sedulius Scotus, to distinguish him from our Sedulius, who is invariably called Caelius Sedulius. He flourished somewhere between 721 and 818, while the best ascertained date of his predecessor’s life appears to be 434.

Our sources of information regarding Sedulius are Isidore of Seville and Fortunatus of Poitiers. Jerome (Hieronymus) left a catalogue of authors from the time of St. Peter to his own day. This was continued by Gennadius, as Notker of St. Gall tells us, and then it was still further extended by Isidore. Neither Jerome nor Gennadius mention our poet; the first because he died in 420, before Sedulius had achieved distinction, and the second possibly for the same reason, as his death occurred about 496 at Marseilles. Isidore (who died 636) then undertook to supply the deficiencies of the catalogue and inserted a brief note respecting Sedulius.

Earlier than Isidore, however, is Fortunatus (530-609), who names our author as one of the five first Christian poets. Juvencus he dates at 330 A.D.; Sedulius flourished in the first half of the fifth century; Prudentius was converted in 405; Paulinus died in 458, and Arator was at his zenith in 560. This would seem to fix pretty closely the period to which Sedulius belongs.

References in the manuscripts are of no additional value. They tell us that he was a “Gentile layman,” or, in other words, a person not of Italian birth; that he learned philosophy in Italy; was converted and baptized by Macedonius, a presbyter; and that he wrote his theological works in Arcadia, or, as some say, Achaia. The Vatican “Codex of the Queen of Sweden” calls him a “verse-maker” and “teacher of the art of heroic metre.” Another codex adds that he also taught other varieties of metrical composition, and that all this happened in the days of the younger Theodosius, son of Arcadius, and of Valentinian, son of Constantine. Of his specific writings still another codex states that he “put forth in Achaia this book against error and composed in verse a commendation of the Christian faith.”

Some Sedulius, “notable for his writings,” appears to have found his way into Spain where, in the year 428, Isicius, a Palestine monk, who had become Bishop of Toledo, detained him for his good fellowship at Toledo. With him is said to have tarried a certain Bishop Oretanus, and the inference is that these three worthies held numerous symposia upon theology and literature. But the story is denied by Nicolaus Antonius, the historian of old Spanish scholarship.

Those minute and laborious investigators, the Benedictines, have, with ant-like patience, threaded every corner of the labyrinth in which these stray facts are gathered. They assert that Macedonius probably received him after he had been baptized by some one else. And while we do not know under what master he studied theology, nor even where the school was located, we know that Sedulius became presbyter in a church whose bishop’s name was Ursinus, and where Ursicinus, Laurentius, and Gallicanus were his co-presbyters.

Ussher relates that the epithet Scotigena—the Scot—was frequently applied to him. Trithemius gives us to understand that he was led by love of learning to visit France, then Italy, then Asia, and then Achaia, and that his reputation was gained in the city of Rome. Sixtus Senensis compares him to Apollonius of Tyana in his zealous pursuit of wisdom; and enlarges the list of countries which he traversed by adding Britain and Spain. Under Theodosius and at Rome, he too declares Sedulius to have been famous in prose and verse. But Ussher first claimed him for Britain; and Ussher it was who maintained that he was a pupil of that Hildebert who ranks among the earliest of the Irish bishops. It must not be forgotten that somewhere in Britain in those days there was the light of Christianity, for in 432 St. Patrick set out from Scotland “to convert Ireland.” Nor can we omit to notice that Ussher styles Sedulius “Scotus Hybernensis,” thus originating the expression “Scotch-Irishman,” but using it in exactly the reverse of its modern sense.

So far as these partial facts and conjectures go we are safe in affirming that Sedulius was a learned and studious person, probably an Irishman—for at that time Scot and Irishman were synonymous—and that he gained renown about the year 434, having studied in Italy, travelled extensively, and been a resident in Achaia. The temptation is, however, irresistible to make him Irish rather than Scotch, upon the strength of the most ancient “bull” on record. It is found in the Alphabet Hymn and reads thus:

“Quarta die jam foetidus

Vitam recepit Lazarus,

Cunctisque liber vinculis

Factus superstes est sibi.”

“Upon the fourth day Lazarus

Revived, though all malodorous;

And freed from the enchaining ground

Himself his own survivor found!”

The writings of Sedulius are more numerous than might be supposed. Those which have been preserved are nine, two in verse and the rest in prose. The most elaborate is a commentary on the four Gospels, dedicated to the abbot Macedonius and to which he prefixed his Carmen Paschale. He also wrote on the Pauline Epistles, as did his namesake of the ninth century. To Theodosius he addressed a book. He wrote treatises on the books of Priscian and Donatus, the grammarians. He also treated of the miracles of Christ in prose and sent out many “epistles of Sedulius Scotigena.” His poetry is comprised in the Alphabet Hymn; in the Carmen Paschale whence we get nothing for hymnology except the hexameter Salve Sancta Parens enixa (puerpera regem); and in the Elegy, from which comes the Cantemus socii.

The Carmen Paschale is an epic in the Virgilian style. The Elegy is an exhortation to the faithful. But the Alphabet Hymn has enriched the Church with two lyrics, one on the Nativity and one on the Slaughter of the Innocents. By placing the first stanza side by side with the first stanza of the famous Ambrosian hymn, it is easily seen that they are the same.

Ambrosian.

“A solis ortus cardine

Et usque terrae limitem

Christum canamus principem

Natum Mariae virginis.”

Sedulian.

“A solis ortus cardine

Ad usque terrae limitem

Christum canamus principem

Natum Maria virgine.”

But this is no unusual occurrence in days when the language of the Psalms was employed in the Ambrosian hymns, and when the Ambrosian hymns themselves furnished a convenient foundation for the later praises of the Church. Not only did Sedulius imitate them closely, but Ennodius, Fortunatus, Gregory, Bede, Rabanus, and Damiani—with many other unknown writers—studied and copied their metre and expression. A curious instance of this same copying and following can be found in our own hymn. In it the stanza, Ibant magi quam viderant, contains two lines which have been inserted bodily in a production of the fourteenth or fifteenth century. It is true that they are very suggestive and beautiful, but when Sedulius wrote

“Stellam sequentes praeviam

Lumen requirunt lumine,”

he wrote what was original with him, but which was sheer theft in the hands of the author of Hymnis laudum preconiis, who nevertheless takes the couplet to grace the feast of the Three Kings.

Latin hymns are by no means all beautiful or all graceful. The earlier pieces appear and reappear—fragments from the better workmanship of the past—throughout the Dark Ages. And here we must leave Sedulius. If he was indeed the companion of Hildebert, his story belongs to that fabulous age of the British Church when bishops were but simple pastors and when great purity and truth prevailed. In the Alphabet Hymn there are references to the direct Scripture narrative; to the “enclosed John” who greets the Saviour; to Him fed with a little milk, who Himself feeds the birds; to the great Shepherd revealed to shepherds; to Herod who seems to fear a King who does not covet earthly dignities; to the Magi who seek their Light from the light; to the healing of the sick and the raising of the dead; to the water that blushes into wine, as perhaps Crashaw had read; to Peter who fears by nature and walks the wave by faith; to Lazarus “his own survivor;” to Judas the carnifex who professed peace by his kiss which was not in his soul; to Him who triumphing over Tartarus returned of Himself to heaven. Such is the hymn, and upon reading it one is not surprised that Fortunatus called its author Sedulius dulcis—the sweet Sedulius. Nay, Rudolph of Dunstable goes so far as to perpetrate a pun, and declares that Sedulius sedulously sings of things that are old and new. And the dear man of God, Dr. Martin Luther of blessed memory, who had no relish for Ambrose’s hymns, called our Irishman a poeta Christianissimus, and translated into his massive German both the hymns the Breviary had extracted from his chief poem.

CHAPTER IX.
VENANTIUS FORTUNATUS THE TROUBADOUR.

Venantius Honorius Clementianus Fortunatus was a man not satisfied with four names. In jest or earnest he assumed another, Theodosius. In point of time he had an interesting position; in regard to residence his story becomes really valuable; and when we add that he gave to the Church several of her best-known hymns, he appears before us as a person unfamiliar, but highly attractive.

If, as we have reason to think, he came into France in 566 or 567, at the age of thirty-five or thirty-six, we must suppose him to have been born about 531. He was an Italian of Treviso, which is not far northwest of Venice and northeast of Padua. Of his parentage and early education (except the fact that he was trained at Ravenna) we are ignorant; but he is said to have been acquainted with Boethius, a thing hard to believe, for the philosopher perished in 524. We are left in some doubt whether he had set forth from Italy because the Lombards were about to invade his part of it, or whether religious motives were at the bottom of this “exile,” as he is very ready to call it.

Judging his unknown past by his better-known later history, he was a man of affable and genial character, who could pay for all favors in the small coin of panegyric, and whose pen filled his pocket and procured him the hospitality of the rich and the great of the earth. We know he could sing, for he says so himself; and he could also turn verses so sweet and mellow that even the poorest of them were learned by his admirers and recited again with much delight. Now it happened that his eyes were affected, and his friend Gregory of Tours sent him some of the blessed St. Martin’s holy lamp-oil. When this was rubbed upon them—and it was doubtless good oil, and therefore not an objectionable ointment—he was greatly helped. He consequently showed his gratitude in two ways: by making a pilgrimage to the blessed St. Martin’s own town, and by writing the blessed St. Martin’s biography. This last he accomplished to the extent of four books of verse, employing, without any apparent scruple, the much more classic and elaborate treatise of Sulpicius Severus as the groundwork of his own. It was this journey which raises the question whether he was avoiding the Lombards or performing a pious vow when he entered France. Perhaps in this, as in other events of his life, the religious garment covered the secular desire.

From his native country, then, he made his way into another and less cultivated region. There was a Gallo-Roman society at the time, very much as there now are groups of educated persons in Siberia, or in the seaboard cities of China. A certain freemasonry of intelligence passed a literary man along from castle to cloister and from cloister to court. It was a period when classic learning was at its lowest ebb, and when the Romance tongues, like the second growth of a forest, were thickly clustering in upon the few survivors of the ancient groves of literature. The sixth century was removed from the past, but had not attained to much on its own account.

Yet we must not think that this century was barren of beginnings. The Merving kings—Clovis, and Childebert, and Clotaire the First, and Charibert—had now given place to Chilperic on the throne of France. Indeed, some writers are inclined to make this sixth century the true commencement of the Middle Ages, and it is very certain that we can see a great deal in the story of Fortunatus which is mediaeval. Moreover, Mohammed was born in 570, at Mecca, while our future bishop was traversing Gaul. And nearly contemporary with our author’s birth—that is, in 533—comes the announcement of the supremacy of the Roman bishop, which culminated in 590 in the strong administration of Gregory the Great. Fortunatus lived, therefore, in days when Latin Christianity was taking shape, and when the most aggressive of false religions was springing up. We have indeed said, in effect, that the Western Empire was at an end, and that the Monarchy of France had begun in 476.

Thus, as he looked backward, the Italian refugee could recall the successive blows of barbarian swords—the swords of Alaric, and Genseric, and Attila, and Odoacer—under which Rome had fallen. When Alboin started his raid from Pannonia in 568, with Lombards (Longobardi) and Gepidae and twenty thousand Saxons, it was surely enough to make a troubadour take refuge at Tours.

Our materials for the biography of Fortunatus from this point in the story become more available. He kept an itinerary, which was lost; but he wrote often to Gregory of Tours, and this seems to be the only correspondence which he conducted in a natural and ordinary manner. From it we learn that he crossed the mountains in a “snowy July,” and had written either “on horseback or half asleep.” He passed some time at Metz and Rheims. His days and nights were spent in travelling and feasting and in preparing songs and odes, to the consternation of his modern biographer, Luchi, who does not find much evidence of piety in these proceedings.

Fortunatus is his own exponent, and his language, literally translated, gives us a vivid picture of the way in which he made friends with everybody. “Travelling among the barbarians” (he writes to Gregory), “on a long journey, either weary of the way or drunk beneath the icy chill, at the exhortation of the muse (I know not whether more cold or sober), a new Orpheus I gave voices to the wood, and the wood replied.” The sentence illustrates not merely his experience but also his style of composition, which is turgid and frequently obscure. His panegyrics, for example, abound in the most fulsome flattery, arrayed bombastically in a string of nouns, verbs, and adjectives half a page long. The real idea walks within much of his Latin, like a pigmy in a great court train, ridiculously small and ridiculously pretentious.

Sometimes these same expressions of our poet betoken a convivial familiarity with his friend Gregory of Tours, which is not precisely canonical. Many post-classical words appear, and phrases which no grammarian would easily justify. The man is full of sly hints of good eating and drinking, and has a high-flown style of compliment, as when he writes to Lupus, “As often as I put together the parts of your discourse, I thought that I reclined upon ambrosial roses.” To Sigismund and Aregesles, two brothers, he declares that, “This sweet letter reveals to me the names of friends. Here is the brilliant Sigismund, and here is the modest Aregesles. After Italy, O Rhine, thou givest me parents, and by the coming of these brothers I shall be no longer a stranger.” In fact, he picked up “brothers” and “parents” with charming facility, and had a dexterity in drawing a corner of the mantle of royal favor over him which any courtier might covet.

Thus he went—we cannot well detect in what order or by what method, but pretty conclusively as a troubadour might have done—all through France. Like Chamisso, he proposed to

“Take his harp in his hand

And wander the wide world over,

Singing from land to land.”

With Sigebert, King of Austrasia, he contracted quite a friendship, and being at Poitiers when Gelesuintha was put to death, he lamented her in verses which pleased Sigebert, her brother-in-law and avenger, greatly. He also became well acquainted with Euphronius of Tours, nephew of St. Gregory, the bishop, and thus laid a good foundation for ecclesiastical preferment. But it was to Poitiers that he gradually drifted, and there circumstances fixed him for the most of his life.

We may safely conclude that Tours, which is not a great distance off, first attracted his wandering feet. He had a duty to the blessed St. Martin’s holy lamp and to the blessed St. Martin’s holy memory, and these devout proceedings were more than sufficient to commend him to a hospitable bishop. Contemporary accounts of him are lacking, if we except the brief notice of Paul the Deacon, which cannot properly be called contemporary, as it is in his history of the Lombards, which was prepared in the first half of the eighth century. But Fortunatus again comes to our rescue with quite a goodly supply of verses and with some epistles which show that the life of that period was a curious resultant between the Roman and barbarian ideas. It ought in honesty to be added that Brunehilda was no saint, and that the court of the Merovingians was so barbaric that it stood by and saw her torn to death, at eighty, at the heels of a wild horse; and this was later even than Fortunatus’s day.

By this time Treviso (Trevisium) had been regularly attacked by the Lombards, and the pilgrimage, which had changed to a pleasure-trip, changed again to a residence. He speaks of himself later as having been “for nine years an exile from Italy,” and his only reference to his family that is discoverable is when he tells the Abbess Agnes that she is as dear to him as his own sister Titiana. He is a poet driven like a leaf before the storm, and he is whirled first into Tours and then into the safe eddy of Poitiers, which he celebrates reverently in song as the home of the great Hilary.

His royal friendships are made apparent by epithalamia—especially that on the marriage of Sigebert and Brunehilda—and by various odes. But now comes the real romance of our poet’s life. Clotaire the First had married a fair woman named Radegunda, whose piety gave him not a little trouble. She was determined to keep all her vigils and fasts and to exert herself in works of charity, even to the scrubbing of the base of the altar with her own hands. It was one of her greatest pleasures to take leprous women in her arms and kiss them, and when one of the lepers said to her, “Who will kiss you after you embrace us?” she “answered benevolently, that if others will not kiss me, it is truly no affair of mine.”

It would be beneath the dignity of this narrative, if it were not a portion of her own life in the Latin, for us to record the incident which helped to cause her separation from her husband. She had arisen at night and came back thoroughly chilled, and with her feet properly cold. Clotaire growled out that he would sooner have a nun for a wife (jugalem monacham) than such a queen. So she took him at his word, founded a convent at Poitiers, and distinguished herself to later generations by many noble works.

Over this convent she placed her maid Agnes, and served her former servant with profound humility and obedience, albeit she must always have been herself the ruling spirit of the place. With Fortunatus she formed a close friendship. And as this is the beginning of the conventual and ecclesiastical side of his career, we may as well bring the story up to its parallel point in current history.

Gregory, Archbishop of Tours and historian of France, always addresses his friend Fortunatus as presbyter Italicus. That Fortunatus embraced the monastic life at Aquileia (about 558-59) has been maintained, and the opinion is also fairly defended that he was enrolled as a “cleric” at Poitiers, although he was novus, or a “new-comer,” there. He had evidently some quasi ecclesiastical connection, and those were days when the celibacy of the clergy was much mooted, but when the wandering monks had not yet been held to the stringencies of the monastic orders. If we ask Fortunatus why he remained in Gaul, he replies that Radegunda retained him there “by her prayers and vows.” It is conjectural that he was first chaplain to the convent, and it is certain that then he was elevated to the rank of Bishop of Poitiers.

To this daughter of Berthar, King of the Thuringi, our troubadour now paid his devoirs. Often at “the convivial banquets of the barbarians” he had “poured forth his verses.” He was now to become the devoted cavalier of a queen and an abbess, and to furnish literature with some very unique specimens of religio-amatory verse.

The life of Radegunda, written by Fortunatus and amplified by the nun Bandonivia, furnishes many interesting facts about this holy woman. She took her final resolution to separate from her husband after he had unjustly put her brother to death. On this she went to St. Medard and declared her intention of celibacy, and thence to the church of St. Martin, at Tours, where she made her formal vows. From this she retired to her villa called Suedas, near Poitiers, which she turned into a convent. Thither in 569 the Emperor Justinus (Justin II.) sent rich presents, one being a portion of the true cross. This inspired Fortunatus with a new song, and he broke out in the Vexilla Regis, which is surely one of the most stirring strains in our hymnology.

The following version expresses literally and without modification the ideas set forth in the Latin: