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
Aquitaine, or sent by him to all points of his empire as his
commissioners, 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.
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