In the library of Trinity College there is preserved a catalogue of the books which Augustine and his monks brought with them into England. "These are the foundation or the beginning of the library of the whole English Church, A.D. 601," are the words with which this brief catalogue closes. A Bible in two volumes, a Psalter and a book of the Gospels, a Martyrology, the Apocryphal Lives of the Apostles, and the exposition of certain Epistles represented at the commencement of the seventh century the sum-total of literature which England then possessed. In little more than fifty years, however, the Latin culture of Augustine and his monks had spread throughout the land, and before the eighth century closed England had become the literary centre of Western Europe. Probably never in the history of any nation had there been so rapid a development of learning. Certainly few things are more remarkable in the history of the intellectual development of Europe than that, in little more than a hundred years after knowledge had first dawned upon this country, an Anglo-Saxon scholar should be producing books upon literature and philosophy second to nothing that had been written by any Greek or Roman author after the third century. But the great writer whom after-ages called "the Venerable Bede," and who was known to his own contemporaries as "the wise Saxon," was not the only scholar that the seventh and the eighth centuries had produced in England. Under the twenty-one years of the Archiepiscopate of Theodore (669-690), schools and monasteries rapidly spread throughout the country. In the school established under the walls of Canterbury, in connection with the Monastery of S. Peter, better known in after-times as S. Augustine's, and over which his friend the Abbot Adrian ruled, were trained not a few of the great scholars of those days--Albinus, the future adviser and assistant of Bede, Tobias of Rochester, Aldhelm of Sherborne, and John of Beverley. The influence of these and other scholars sent out from the school at Canterbury soon made itself felt. In Northumbria, too, the torch of learning had been kept alight by the Irish monks of Lindisfarne, and of Melrose and of Iona, "that nest from which," as an old writer playing on its founder S. Columba's name had said, "the sacred doves had taken their flight to every quarter."