Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI ALCUIN'S CHARACTER It is not surprising that conflicting judgments have been passed upon the character of Alcuin. He belonged to an age alien to our own both in the substance and manner of its intellectual life. He belonged, moreover, to an age wherein we see, with some confusion of vision, the disappearance of an old chaotic state of things and the emerging of a new social order, — one of those times in history when the cross-currents run so strongly that it often becomes hard to hold in view the true central drift of affairs. Besides this, it must be remembered that in his chief public activity he was a stranger in a strange land, and the characteristics of the raw, unformed Franks in their effect on the manifestation of his own traits among them, and through his behavior among them to us, must be taken into account. Additional elements which require to be appreciated are the Anglo- Saxon antecedents of Alcuin, his own personal traits so far as separable from his surroundings, the character of the teaching he received at York and of the masters who gave it, the actual sum of the learning of the time and the nature of his acquaintance with it, and the effect of his ownefforts upon his pupils and their successors. Thus, because of this complexity of elements and the additional embarrassment caused by the imperfection of our records, there have been almost as many opinions as writers about Alcuin. " Considering the period in which he lived, he may be regarded as a universal genius," J is the judgment of one of his biographers. Another depicts him as " full of faith in the power and the destiny of man's intellect," and in fact quite a modern in his attitude.2 The Abb6 LaforSt in his sketch exceeds all bounds of moderation in eulogizing Alcuin's learning. "The erudit...