eda never stirred from Jarrow. "I spent my whole life in the same
monastery," he says, "and while attentive to the rule of my order and
the service of the Church, my constant pleasure lay in learning, or
teaching, or writing." The words sketch for us a scholar's life, the
more touching in its simplicity that it is the life of the first great
English scholar. The quiet grandeur of a life consecrated to knowledge,
the tranquil pleasure that lies in learning and teaching and writing,
dawned for Englishmen in the story of Baeda. While still young, he
became teacher, and six hundred monks, besides strangers that flocked
thither for instruction, formed his school of Jarrow. It is hard to
imagine how, among the toils of the schoolmaster and the duties of the
monk, Baeda could have found time for the composition of the numerous
works that made his name famous in the West. But materials for study had
accumulated in Northumbria through the journeys of Wilfrith and Benedict
Biscop, and Archbishop Eegberht was forming the first English library at
York. The tradition of the older Irish teachers still lingered to direct
the young scholar into that path of scriptural interpretation to which
he chiefly owed his fame. Greek, a rare accomplishment in the West,
came to him from the school which the Greek Archbishop Theodore founded
beneath the walls of Canterbury. His skill in the ecclesiastical chaunt
was derived from a Roman cantor whom Pope Vilalian sent in the train of
Benedict Biscop. Little by little the young scholar thus made himself
master of the whole range of the science of his time; he became,
as Burke rightly styled him, "the father of English learning." The
tradition of the older classic culture was first revived for England
in his quotations of Plato and Aristotle, of Seneca and Cicero, of
Lucretius and Ovid. Virgil cast over him the same spell that he cast
over Dante; verses from the. Aeneid break his narratives of martyrdoms,
and the disciple ventures on the track of the great master in a little
eclogue descriptive of the approach of spring. His work was done with
small aid from others. "I am my own secretary," he writes; "I make my
own notes. I am my own librarian." But forty-five works remained after
his death to attest his prodigious industry. In his own eyes and
those of his contemporaries, the most important among these were the
commentaries and homilies upon various books of the Bible which he had
drawn from the writi