There is no mention of Horace in the
catalogues of Italy. The manuscripts of France are careless, the
comments and glosses poor. The decline will continue until arrested by
the Renaissance.
It must not be forgotten that among all these scattered and flickering
attentions to Horace there was the constant nucleus of instruction in
the school. That he was used for this purpose first in the Carolingian
cloister-schools, and later in the secular schools which grew to
independent existence as a result of the vigorous spread of educational
spirit, cannot be doubtful. Gerbert, dying at the beginning of the
eleventh century as Pope Sylvester II, is known to have interpreted
Horace in his school. This is the oldest direct evidence of the
scholastic use of Horace, but other proofs are to be seen in the
commentaries of the medieval period, all of which are of a kind suitable
for school use, and in the marginal annotations, often in the native
tongue.
The decline of humane studies in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
meant also the decline of interest in Horace, who had always been above
all the poet of the cultivated few.
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