can only be a selection of what he thought the most important. Among them appear the Greek fathers, Athanasius, Chrysostom, Basil, partly perhaps in their original
tongue;[1] with a good number of the Latins. Of
classical poets are named Virgil, Statius, and Lucan;
of their degenerate successors, Sedulius, Juvencus, Arator,
and Fortunatus. History is represented by Pompeius
Trogus, that is, in the abridgement which we know as
Justin, and Bede; natural history by Pliny. Cicero is
named only as an orator. For logic Alcuin mentions
Aristotle, -certainly in a Latin guise,[2] and the translators and commentators, Victorinus and Boethius ; for grammar Donatus, Priscian, and Servius. These are the
better known of the authors recited in this interesting
poem. Alcuin studied them with the simple purpose of
fitting himself to be a teacher. He adopts and adapts,
as he thinks most appropriate to his scope ; but he creates
nothing. On the problems which were so soon to agitate
the schools, the nature of being, and the relation of objects
to thought, he has little to say of his own ; his psychology
is directly derived from saint Augustin, his logic from the
abbreviators of Aristotle. Learning in England had
indeed begun to decline, but before the process had gone
too far, Alcuin transplanted it; and, whatever his intellectual limitations, just such a man was needed to set on foot a sound system of education in the Frankish
realm.
It has been maintained that Alcuin, at least in his later years, and the Scots with whom he worked held opposed positions in this movement; that Alcuin remained true to the tradition of saint Gregory, while the
- ↑ Bishop Stubbs thinks that the York library actually contained manuscripts both in Greek and Hebrew : Smith and Wace s Die- tionary of Christian Biography, art. Alcuin, 1. 73 a; 1877. But Alcuin s words, de Pontif. 1535- 1539, Jafte p. 128, need not be pressed to mean more than the source from which the litorature he mentions was derived; he does not speak of the language.
- ↑ Most probably the reference is to the abridgement of the Categories then ascribed to saint Augustin: cf. Haureau 1. 93-97.
