among the most savage of the northern tribes. They slaughtered their captives taken in war, and drove a lucrative trade by the sale of their countrymen, and even of their own children, to foreign merchants. The courage which formed their solitary virtue too often degenerated into a brutal ferocity, and their notions of a future state were exceedingly faint. In Gaul they were regarded with terror as barbarians of uncouth speech and aspect, and strange stories were told of their reckless deeds of bloodshed and cruelty. Gregory himself would probably have found it difficult to explain the hold they had gained on his heart ever since he first beheld the blue-eyed and golden-haired Angles in the market-place of Rome. But from that moment the thought of them never left him; and though frustrated in his purpose of himself becoming their apostle, he made it a labour of love to provide for their conversion by other hands. His first plan had been a sort of anticipation of the system since so successfully carried out by the Roman Propaganda. He conceived the idea of redeeming a certain number of the Anglo-Saxon youths annually brought into the slave-markets of Gaul, educating them in some monastery school, and then sending them back as missionaries to their own country. We are not told why this scheme was abandoned, but in 596 the English mission was at last opened, and a band of Roman monks, headed by St. Augustine, the former prior of St. Gregory’s monastery set out for the barbarous and unknown island. Never was any mission more amply cared for. St. Gregory had poured out his whole heart upon it; he multiplied letters to the bishops and Sovereigns of Gaul to secure his monks hospitality on the road; his letters cheered them on their way, and when the welcome tidings came that their work had begun under prosperous auspices, he sent them a reinforcement of labourers under the abbot Mellitus, bringing everything necessary for the celebration of the Divine offices--sacred vessels, vestments, church ornaments, holy relics, and “many books.” A catalogue of the library which St. Augustine and his companions brought with them into England is preserved at Trinity College, Cambridge. It consisted of 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 and Gospels. The brief catalogue closes with these words: “These are the foundation or beginning of the library of the whole English Church, A.D. 601.” These were the books sent to us by a Pope to be the beginning of our national library, and from them did St. Augustine and his companions begin to teach the English.