The death of Cassiodorus occurred in 575, in the ninety-sixth year of his age. An inheritor of the traditions of imperial Rome, Cassiodorus had been able, in a career extending over nearly a century, to be of signal service to his country under a series of foreign rulers. He had succeeded, through his personal influence with these rulers, in maintaining for Italy an organisation based on Roman precedents, and in preserving for the society of the capital an interest in the preservation and cultivation of classic literature. When the political institutions of Italy had been shattered and the very existence of civilisation was imperilled, he had transferred his services to the Church, recognising, with the adaptability which was the special characteristic of the man, that with the Church now rested the hopes of any continuity of organised society, of intellectual interest, of civilisation itself. He brought to the Church the advantage of exceptional executive ability and of long official experience, and he also brought a large measure of scholarship and an earnest zeal for literary and educational interests. It is not too much to say that the continuity of the thought and civilisation of the ancient world with that of the Middle Ages was due, more than to any other one man, to the life and labours of Cassiodorus. =S. Benedict.=--The _Life of S. Benedict_, written by Pope Gregory I. (who was born in 543, the year of the death of the saint), was for centuries one of the most popular books circulated in Europe. The full title is: _Vita et Miracula Venerabilis Benedicti conditoris, vel Abbatis Monasterii; quod appellatur arcis Provinciæ Campaniæ_. “The Life and Miracles of the Venerable Benedict, Founder and Abbot of the Monastery which is called (of) the Citadel of the Province of Campania.” This biography was, later, translated by Pope Zacharias from the original Latin into Greek. The great achievement of Benedict was the one literary product of his life, the _Regula_. It comprises seventy-three short chapters, probably not designed by the author for use beyond the bounds of the communities under his own immediate supervision. It proved to be the thing for which the world of religious and thoughtful men was then longing, a complete code of monastic duty. By a strange parallelism, almost in the very year in which the great Emperor Justinian was codifying the results of seven centuries of Roman secular legislation for the benefit of the judges and the statesmen of the new Europe, Benedict, on his lonely mountain top, was composing his code for the regulation of the daily life of the great civilisers of Europe for seven centuries to come.