master, and head master. We may now turn to that man, whose early lot was cast in a state of society, lay and clerical, such as that described in scathing terms by Bede; and who was the first-fruits of the remedy which Bede had suggested. As a link between Bede and Alcuin we may have in mind a pretty little story about Bede which we find in a letter of Alcuin’s some fifty or sixty years after Bede’s death. [Sidenote: Ep. 274. Before A.D. 793.] Alcuin is writing to the monks of Wearmouth. He tells them how well he remembers what he saw at Wearmouth long years ago, and how much he was pleased with everything he saw. He encourages them to continue in the right way by reminding them of the virtues of their founders. “It is certain,” he writes, “that your founders very often visit the place of your dwelling. They rejoice with all whom they find keeping their statutes and living right lives; and they cease not to intercede for such with the pious judge. Nor is it doubtful that visitations of angels frequent holy places; for it is reported that our master and your patron the blessed Bede said, ‘I know that angels visit the canonical hours and the congregations of the brethren. What if they should not find me among the brethren? Would they not have to say, Where is Bede? Why does he not come with the brethren to the appointed prayers?’” To us in England, and especially to those of us who are North-countrymen, nothing that Alcuin wrote has a higher interest than his poem in Latin hexameters on the Bishops and Saints of the Church of York. By the Church of York Alcuin evidently meant the Church of Northumbria, although his account of the prelates dwells chiefly on the archbishops of his time. Considering his long sojourn in France, it was fitting that the manuscript of this famous poem should be discovered at a monastery near Reims, the monastery of St. Theodoric, or Thierry according to the later spelling. A great part of the poem is in the main a versification of Bede’s prose history of the conversion of the North to Christianity, and an adaptation of Bede’s metrical life of St. Cuthbert. On this account the French transcriber from the original omitted about 1100 of the 1657 lines of which the poem consists, and only about 550 lines were originally printed by Mabillon in the Acta Sanctorum. When our own Gale was preparing to publish it, he got the missing verses both from the St. Theodoric MS. and also from a MS. at Reims itself. Both manuscripts disappeared long ago, probably in the devastations of the French Revolution[85].