with those scenes of violence and devastation that were turning many a fair district of Gaul and Italy into a howling wilderness, found all that remained of Roman learning and civilisation linked with the higher attractions of Christian devotion; and were able, amid the monastic shades of Vivaria, to enjoy at one and the same time the calm of retirement and the solace of prayer. The foundation of Cassiodorus took place in the year 540. Eighteen years previously--in 522--the two Roman senators, Equitius and Tertullus, had taken their sons Maurus and Placidus to the grotto of Subiaco, and committed them to the care of a solitary named Benedict. Maurus was twelve years old and Placidus seven, and they were soon joined by other children of the same age. They were humble beginnings indeed of a mighty edifice, the first fruits of the Benedictine schools.[35] In 543 St. Maurus carried the rule of St. Benedict into Gaul, where monasteries soon multiplied, in which were cultivated letters both sacred and profane.[36] But they were not the earliest monastic schools which had sprung up on the Gallican soil. I need not here remind the reader of that famous abbey of Marmoutier, erected by St. Martin of Tours in the fourth century, and formed on the model of those episcopal monasteries founded by St. Eusebius of Vercelli and St. Ambrose of Milan. Yet more celebrated, and more closely associated with the history of letters in our own country, was the school of Lerins, a rocky isle off the coast of Gaul, where, about the year 400, St. Honoratus fixed his abode, peopling it with a race of monks who united the labours of the scholar to the penitential practices of the recluse. Its rule, though strictly monastic, aimed at making its disciples apostolic men, “thoroughly furnished to all good works.” Hence the brethren were not required to renounce the pursuit of letters. St. Honoratus himself did not disdain the flowers of eloquence, and the sweetness of his style drew from St. Eucher the graceful remark, that “he restored the honey to the wax.”[37] St. Hilary of Arles, another of the Lerins scholars, is represented by his biographer sitting among his clergy with a table before him, whereon lay his book and the materials of his manual work, and while his fingers were busy making nets, dictating to a cleric, who took down his notes in shorthand. It would take us too long to enumerate the distinguished prelates who were sent forth from the school of Lerins during the sixth century. The names of St. Cesarius of Arles and St. Vincent of Lerins; of Salvian, the master of bishops as he was called; of St. Eucher, the purity of whose Latin eloquence even Erasmus has praised; and of St. Lupus of Troyes, whom Sidonius Apollinaris hesitated not to call the first bishop in the Christian world--may suffice to show what sort of scholars were produced by this holy congregation.