Walburga and her nuns seem to have cultivated letters as diligently in their forest home as by the banks of the Wimburnia. The travels of St. Wilibald, who had made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and often related what he had seen to his sister and her nuns, were afterwards written by them, not certainly in very classical Latin, but with a lucidity and truthfulness of style which appears in all the Anglo-Saxon writers, and which contrasts very remarkably with the marvellous narrations of Sir John Mandeville. St. Walburga appears also to have been the author of the “Life of St. Winibald,” and it is quite clear that the singular taste for literature existing among German nuns in the tenth century formed part of the tradition which they had received from their Anglo-Saxon foundresses. Mabillon praises not merely their erudition, but the zeal they displayed in employing it for the good of their neighbours, and says that, moved by a laudable emulation, they devoted themselves to study and the transcription of books with no less energy than the monks. He particularly praises the nuns of Eiken, who employed their time in reading, meditating, transcribing, and painting; specially the two abbesses Harlinda and Renilda, who wrote out the Psalter, the four Gospels, and many other books of Holy Scripture, adorning them with liquid gold, gems, and pearls. The after-career of St. Boniface exhibits him to us reforming the Frankish Church, long vexed with schism and other frightful disorders, which had grown out of a century of treasons and civil distractions unequalled in any history. The enemies of discipline were naturally enough enemies also to the authority of the Holy See. They had taken advantage of the chaotic state to which society had returned to reject the law of clerical celibacy, and to establish the practice of simony on a gigantic scale. St. Boniface struck at the root of the evil by enforcing obedience to the Roman pontiff, and, happily for the future destinies of the French Church, his efforts were heartily supported by the brothers Carloman and Pepin, the two mayors of the palace, and the real sovereigns of Gaul. His canons of reform were promulgated in a grand national council, and in 748 Pope Zachary established the authority of the see of Mentz over all the German provinces from Utrecht to the Rhetian Alps. One would have thought that the government of such a province would have sufficed to employ the energies of one man; but Boniface kept a place in his thoughts for the necessities of his native land. Exile as he was, he never forgot that he was an Englishman, and though it does not appear that he ever revisited his own country, he took a very active part in some of her affairs. It is rather puzzling to make out how in those days of rude civilization the German missionaries contrived to carry on their voluminous correspondence with friends at home, for the transmission of letters was certainly not provided