laity.  An inconceivable cloud of ignorance overspread the whole face of the Church, hardly broken by a few glimmering lights, who owe almost the whole of their distinction to the surrounding darkness....  Of this prevailing ignorance it is easy to produce abundant testimony.  Contracts were made verbally, for want of notaries capable of drawing up charters; and these, when written, were frequently barbarous and ungrammatical to an incredible degree.  For some considerable intervals, scarcely any monument of literature has been preserved, except a few jejune chronicles, the vilest legends of saints, or verses equally destitute of spirit and metre.  In almost every council the ignorance of the clergy forms a subject for reproach.  It is asserted by one held in 992, that scarcely a single person was to be found in Rome itself who knew the first element of letters.  Not one priest of a thousand in Spain, about the age of Charlemagne, could address a common letter of salutation to another.  In England, Alfred declares that he could not recollect a single priest south of the Thames (the most civilised part of England) at the time of his accession who understood the ordinary prayers, or could translate Latin into his mother-tongue.  Nor was this better in the time of Dunstan, when it is said, none of the clergy knew how to write or translate a Latin letter.  The homilies which they preached were compiled for their use by some bishops, from former works of the same kind, or the writings of the Christian fathers....  If we would listen to some literary historians, we should believe that the darkest ages contained many individuals, not only distinguished among their contemporaries, but positively eminent for abilities and knowledge.  A proneness to extol every monk of whose productions a few letters or a devotional treatise survives, every bishop of whom it is related that he composed homilies, runs through the laborious work of the Benedictines of St. Maur, the ‘Literary History of France,’ and, in a less degree, is observable even in Tiraboschi, and in most books of this class.  Bede, Alcuin, Hincmar, Raban, and a number of inferior names, become real giants of learning in their uncritical panegyrics.  But one might justly say, that ignorance is the smallest defect of the writers of these dark ages.  Several of these were tolerably acquainted with books; but that wherein they are uniformly deficient is original argument or expression.  Almost every one is a compiler of scraps from the fathers, or from such semi-classical authors as Boethius, Cassiodorus, or Martinus Capella.  Indeed, I am not aware that there appeared more than two really considerable men in the republic of letters from the sixth to the middle of the eleventh century—­John, surnamed Scotus, or Erigena, a native of Ireland, and Gerbert, who became pope by the name of Sylvester II.:  the first endowed with a bold and acute metaphysical genius, the second excellent, for the time when he lived, in mathematical science and useful mechanical invention” ("Europe during the Middle Ages,” Hallam, pp. 595-598).