of which he sent as a present to the Pope, whilst the other two were placed in the two churches, “to the end that all who wished to read any passage in either Testament might at once find what they wanted.” Naitan, king of the Picts, applied to him for church ornaments, as he had applied to St. Bennet for masons. The abbot’s reply may be quoted as giving some notion of his scholarship. “A certain worldly ruler,” he wrote, “most truly said that the world would be happy if either philosophers were kings, or kings philosophers. Now if a worldly man could judge thus truly of the philosophy of this world, how much more were it to be desired that the more powerful men are in this world the more they would labour to be acquainted with the commandments of God.” In this passage the Anglo-Saxon monk is quoting from the Republic of Plato. St. Bede, who has preserved these records of the Fathers of Wearmouth and Jarrow, dwells with delight on the memory of the many happy years he himself passed within those walls, and on the thought that none of them had been spent in idleness. “All my life,” he says, “I have spent in this monastery, giving my whole attention to the study of the Holy Scriptures; and in the intervals between the hours of regular discipline, and the duties of church psalmody, I ever took delight in either learning, teaching, or writing.” It was his love of study that made him decline the office of abbot, “for that office demands thoughtfulness, and thoughtfulness brings distraction of mind, which is an impediment to learning.” Though invited to Rome by Pope Sergius, it appears certain that he never left his own country, and that all he knew was derived from native teachers, principally, as he tells us, from the abbots Bennet and Ceolfrid. The science of music, indeed, in which he excelled, and on which he wrote several treatises, he had studied under John of St. Martin’s; Trumhere, a monk of Lestingham, was his master in divinity, and his Greek scholarship was probably acquired from Archbishop Theodore himself. But the varied character of Bede’s erudition must be principally explained by his free use of Biscop’s noble libraries. It was at the command of his abbot, and of St. John of Beverley, who ordained him priest, that he began, at thirty years of age, to write for the instruction of his countrymen. For his greater convenience a little building was erected apart from the monastery, which Simeon of Durham speaks of as yet standing in the twelfth century, “where, free from all distraction, he could sit, meditate, read, write, or dictate.” The original building must have been swept away at the time of the destruction of the monastery by the Danes in 794, yet Leland describes what he calls St. Bede’s oratory, as remaining, even in his time.