462 CHRONICLES, HISTORIES, MEMOIRS. 



English historians relates that the kings had in constant attendance at their 

 court certain men of letters who were intrusted with the task of recording 

 their memorable sayings and doings, in order to transmit them, after their 

 death, to posterity. Egiiihard, the secretary (notarhis) of Charlemagne, held 

 this confidential post, and he was also selected by that monarch to supervise 

 the education of the heirs to his throne. It was, no doubt, in order to acquit 

 himself of this task that the learned favourite of the Emperor retired into the 

 Monastery of Selingstadt, where he arranged the materials for his Life of 

 Charlemagne. This work, the best of all those which he has left, was 

 apparently composed in imitation of Suetonius's Lives of the Twelve Caesars. 

 In reading it one can easily see that the author was a member of the Pauline 

 Academy, and that, in spite of his rugged and faulty style, he endeavoured to 

 imitate the historical writers of ancient Rome. 



It is strange that the historical monuments of Charlemagne's epoch should 

 be so few, for that sovereign was fond of literature, and encouraged those who 

 cultivated it, and he must have followed with interest the progress of 

 historical study. He may not, however, have cared to be the subject of 

 works which he could not himself revise, and, as a matter of fact, most of the 

 Chronicles treating of his reign are posterior to his death (814). There is no 

 evidence that any of the distinguished scholars whom he had collected about 

 him were ordered to write his own history. During his meals he had 

 read to him the historical songs of the nations of the North and of Germany 

 (cantilena historicce), which he had got together as materials for a history of 

 the past, and he probably listened with not less interest to the songs of the 

 bards who celebrated his warlike achievements in poems which were written 

 in the vulgar tongue, but which were afterwards translated into Latin, and 

 finally paraphrased into chansons de gcstc in the language of the twelfth 

 century. But, excepting Eginhard, there were no scribes or secretaries in the 

 palace intrusted with the duty of writing, under the Emperor's supervision, 

 the official record of his public and private life. 



Charlemagne had been long in his grave when the monk of St. Gall, 

 generally believed to be a man named Necker, published in two books, after 

 the evidence of two contemporaries, Priest Werinbert and Chevalier Adalbert, 

 a Chronicle (" De Gestis Caroli Magni ") which he dedicated to Charles the 

 Fat, Emperor of Germany. This Chronicle, composed a hundred and seventy 

 years after the Emperor's death, and the author of which glorified his memory, 



