of sacred learning in her schools. With this view he sent together with Theodore, the abbot Adrian, whom William of Malmsbury calls “a fountain of letters, and a river of arts.” At the same time Benedict Biscop received orders to join the company of the new archbishop and to him was committed the direction of the monastery and school of Canterbury. But Benedict had one purpose fixed in his heart; it was to devote his life and extraordinary energies to the foundation of a great seat of learning and religion in his own land, and to fit himself thoroughly for the work before he began it. The weald of Kent might have richer pastures, the sky of Italy a softer glow, but the brown moors of Northumbria were ever present to his mind’s eye, and it was there that he desired to spend and be spent for Christ. He was not long before he found out that Adrian’s acquirements were far beyond his own; so resigning the abbacy into his hands, from a master he became a scholar, and spent two years more studying under him, and acting as interpreter to him and to the archbishop. Theodore had brought with him a large addition to the English library, and among his books were a copy of Homer (which, in Archbishop Parker’s days, was still preserved at Canterbury), the works of Josephus, and the homilies of St. Chrysostom. Bede’s account of the new life infused into the English schools by these two illustrious foreigners is doubtless familiar to all readers. Yet it is too much to the purpose to be omitted here. “Assisted by Adrian,” he says, “the archbishop everywhere taught the right rule of life and the canonical custom of celebrating Easter. And forasmuch as both of them were well read in sacred and secular literature, they gathered a crowd of disciples, and there daily flowed from them rivers of knowledge to water the hearts of their hearers: and together with the books of Holy Writ, they also taught the arts of ecclesiastical poetry, astronomy, and arithmetic. So that there are still living to this day some of their scholars who are as well versed in the Greek and Latin tongues as in their own wherein they were born. Never were there happier times since the English came to Britain, for their kings being brave men and good Christians, were a terror to barbarous nations, and the minds of all men were bent upon the joys of the heavenly kingdom of which they had heard; and all who desired to be instructed in sacred literature had masters at hand to teach them.”