but we must not deceive ourselves; this naïveté is a matter of deliberate art. Gregory does not of course observe strict grammatical correctness; he is by no means Ciceronian; he writes the language as it was spoken in his day. In a few passages only, where he is obviously writing with conscious effort, he employs rare and poetical expressions, as for example in the account of the baptism of Clovis, in the description of Dijon, in the narrative of his quarrels with Count Leudastes. But to these we prefer those pages where he lets himself go, and writes with his natural vigour, where he slips in malicious reflexions as it were unconsciously, or where he excoriates his adversaries. He has the real gift of story-telling and has justly been called the barbarian Herodotus. After his day all culture disappeared. A vast difference separates him from his continuator, the chronicler who has been named — we do not know for what reason — Fredegar. The chronicle of Fredegar is composed of scraps and fragments from various sources. One of the authors from whom extracts are made writes, "The world is growing old; the keenness of intelligence is becoming blunted in us; no one in the present age can compare with the orators of past times," and this phrase might be applied to the whole of the work. Nevertheless there are still found in Fredegar attempts at portraits of some of the Mayors of the Palace, Bertoald, Protadius, Aega, whereas in the last chronicler of the period, the Neustrian who compiled the Liber Historiae Francorum, there is no longer anything of that kind; it is a very meagre chronicle of the rois fainéants. The lives of the saints, which are still numerous enough, are singularly monotonous; they rarely inform us of any facts and are as like each other as one ecclesiastical image is to another.
A certain number of churches were built during the Merovingian period, such as those of Clermont, Nantes, and Lyons, without counting the abbey churches such as St. Martin de Tours and St Vincent or St Germain-des-Près at Paris, but of these great buildings no trace remains to us. The only remnants of buildings of this period belong to less important edifices, such as the baptisteries of Riez in Provence and St Jean de Poitiers, the crypt of St Laurent at Grenoble, and of the abbey of Jouarre. The great churches which are known to us from descriptions generally have a nave and two side-aisles with a transept, and are in the form of a Latin cross. At the point of intersection of nave and transept there was a tower, which at first served by way of "Lantern," but afterwards to hang bells in. On the walls were placed numerous inscriptions, sentences taken from the Scriptures, verses in honour of the saints. Pictures recalled to the faithful the history of the saints or scenes from Scripture. Often, instead of pictures, the walls, as well as the floor, were covered with mosaic-work in which gold was freely used; a basilica at Toulouse was known for this reason as la Daurade. Sculpture in high relief was unknown, even in bas-reliefs the human figure appears very rarely after the sixth century. The artists could no longer even
