And classical literature was received into the fold for a like purpose. From the earliest days of Christendom prejudice against the classics was widespread among Christians. Such books, it was urged, had no connexion with the Church or the Gospel; Ciceronianism was not the road to God; Plato and Aristotle could not show the way to happiness; Ovid, above all, was to be avoided.[515] In dreams the poets took the form of demons; they must be exorcised, for the soul did not profit by them. The precepts--and for these the Christian sought--in the poems were like serpents, born of the evil one; the characters, devils. Some Christians sighed as they thrust the tempting books away. Jerome frankly confesses he cared little for the homely Latin of the Psalms, and much for Plautus and Cicero. For a time he renounced them with other vanities of the world; yet when going through the catacombs at Rome, where the Apostles and Martyrs had their graves, a fine line of Virgil thrills him; and later he instructed boys at Bethlehem in Plautus, Terence, and Virgil, much to the horror of Rufinus. Even in the eleventh century this feeling existed. Lanfranc wrote to Dumnoaldus to say it was unbefitting he should study such books, but he confessed that although he now renounced them, he had read them a good deal in his youth. Somewhat later Herbert “Losinga,” abbot of Ramsey, had a dream which led him to cease reading and imitating Virgil and Ovid; but elsewhere he recommends his pupils to accept Ovid as a model in Latin verse, while he quotes the _Tristia_.[516] The rules of some orders, as those of Isidore, St. Francis, and St. Dominic, forbade the reading of the classics, save by permission. For their value in teaching grammar and as models of literary style, however, certain classic authors--especially Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, and Statius--were regarded as supplementary to the grammatical works of Donatus, Victorinus, Macrobius, and Priscian, and were studied by the religious throughout the Middle Ages. They were grammatical text-books, as indeed they are still; but then they were very little else. A man would call himself Virgil, not from inordinate vanity, but from a naive pride in his profession of grammarian: to his way of thinking the great poet was no more.[517] “As decade followed decade,” writes Mr. H. O. Taylor, “and century followed century, there was no falling off in the study of the _Æneid_. Virgil’s fame towered, his authority became absolute. But how? In what respect? As a supreme master of grammatical correctness and rhetorical excellence and of all learning. With increasing emptiness of soul, the grammarians--the ‘Virgils’--of the succeeding centuries put the great poet to ever baser uses.”[518]