tian England. It was doubtless suggested by the Frankish history of
Gregory of Tours, and it consists of five books, divided into short
chapters, making up about 400 pages of a modern octavo. Five
manuscripts, one of them transcribed only two years after Baeda's death,
and now deposited in the Cambridge library, preserve for us the text of
this priceless document. The work itself should be read in the original,
or in one of the many excellent translations, by every person who takes
any intelligent interest in our early history.

Baeda's accomplishments included even a knowledge of Greek--then a rare
acquisition in the west--which he probably derived from Archbishop
Theodore's school at Canterbury. He was likewise an English author, for
he translated the Gospel of St. John into his native Northumbrian; and
the task proved the last of his useful life. Several manuscripts have
preserved to us the letter of Cuthberht, afterwards Abbot of Jarrow, to
his friend Cuthwine, giving us the very date of his death, May 27, A.D.
735, and also narrating the pathetic but somewhat overdrawn picture,
with which we are all familiar, of how he died just as he had completed
his translation of the last chapter. "Thus saying, he passed the day in
peace till eventide. The boy [his scribe] said to him, 'Still one
sentence, beloved master, is yet unwritten.' He answered, 'Write it
quickly.' After a while the boy said, 'Now the sentence is written.'
Then he replied, 'It is well,' quoth he, 'thou hast said the truth: it
is finished.'... And so he passed away to the kingdom of heaven."

It is impossible to overrate the importance of the change which made
such a life of earnest study and intellectual labour as Baeda's possible
amongst the rough and barbaric English. Nor was it only in producing
thinkers and readers from a people who could not spell a word half a
century before, that the monastic system did good to England. The
monasteries owned large tracts of land which they could cultivate on a
co-operative plan, as cultivation was impossible elsewhere. _Laborare
est orare_ was the true monastic motto: and the documents of the
religious houses, relating to lands and leases, show us the other or
material side of the picture, which was not less important in its way
than the spiritual and intellectual side. Everywhere the monks settled
in the woodland by the rivers, cut down the forests, drove out the
wolves and the beavers, cultivated the soil with