The importance of St. Gregory’s foundation regarded from this point of view will readily appear. It was in some sort the mother of those grand liturgical schools which were afterwards to cover the face of Europe, the erection of which in any country serves as an epoch to mark the introduction or restoration of Christian letters. Henceforth, for nine centuries at least, grammar and the Cantus, the Latin tongue and the Roman music, were to take their places side by side as the two indispensables of education. Up to this time even the Christian learning had been coloured by a civilisation of pagan growth; but a new era had now begun: the Holy Scriptures and the Liturgy of the Church were to become to Christian Europe what the profane poets had been to the ancient world--the fountains of inspiration and the intellectual moulds wherein a new generation was to be cast; and though scholars were far from abandoning Virgil, yet for long ages the Muse of Solyma was to hold the mastery in the schools. This new era of letters may be said to commence with St. Gregory, for the schools of Christian origin which existed before his time were fast becoming extinct, and it was chiefly from the new foundation, planted by him on English soil, that the torch of science was relit. How truly was he termed the Great, this pontiff, prince, and tutor of a barbarous world! Yet to conceive aright of his greatness we must remember that his work was painfully wrought out in the midst of continual bodily sufferings and mental troubles yet harder to bear. He who may be said to have founded the temporal sovereignty of the Roman Pontiffs had his throne in the midst of ruins. He delivered his discourses on Ezechiel while the barbarous Lombards were marching against his capital. He had to witness the Roman nobles dragged off into slavery with ropes about their necks, to be sold like dogs in the markets of Gaul. Then came the news that Monte Cassino was in flames and its monks cast out as houseless wanderers. “Woe is me!” he exclaims, “all Europe is in the hands of the barbarians. Cities are cast down, villages in ruins, whole provinces depopulated; the land has no longer men to cultivate it; and the idolaters pursue us even to death.” Yet in this awful crisis his mind was bent on effecting new conquests for the faith, and he was planning the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons with the Lombards at his gates. Many writers have not hesitated to ascribe the pertinacity with which he carried out this, his favourite enterprise, to the profound sagacity of an ecclesiastical politician, who foresaw that the loyal devotion of the new converts to the Holy See would repair the losses inflicted by the barbarians on the rest of Christendom. But it may safely be affirmed that no mere natural acuteness could possibly have predicted anything favourable from the dispositions which had hitherto been manifested by the Anglo-Saxons. Ancient writers are unanimous in classing them