He gave rein, therefore, without any embarrassment or misgiving, to his spontaneous inclination towards them, their studies, their labors, and their influence.

He drew them into the management of affairs.

In Guizot's _History of Civilization in France_ there is a list of the names and works of twenty-three men of the eighth and ninth centuries who have escaped oblivion, and they are all found grouped about Charlemagne as his own habitual advisers, or assigned by him as advisers to his sons Pepin and Louis in Italy and Aquitania, or sent by him to all points of his empire as his commissioners (_missi dominici_), or charged in his name with important negotiations.

And those whom he did not employ at a distance formed, in his immediate neighborhood, a learned and industrious society, a school of the palace, according to some modern commentators, but an academy, and not a school, according to others, devoted rather to conversation than to teaching.

It probably fulfilled both missions; it attended Charlemagne at his various residences, at one time working for him at questions he invited them to deal with, at another giving to the regular components of his court, to his children and to himself, lessons in the different sciences called liberal, grammar, rhetoric, logic, astronomy, geometry, and even theology and the great religious problems it was beginning to discuss.
[Illustration: Charlemagne presiding at the School of the Palace----246] Two men, Alcuin and Eginhard, have remained justly celebrated in the literary history of the age.