If the bold and mountainous scenery of Northumbria has become indelibly associated in our mind with the lives of those saintly scholars who have been made known to us by the pen of Bede, far away at the other extremity of England there is a province which still claims as its patron saint one whose learning was as great as theirs, and whose action on the Church was even yet more important. St Boniface, or Winfrid, as he was called before he entered on his apostolic labours, was born in the same year that witnessed the entrance of Bede into the monastery of Jarrow. They were therefore contemporaries, though widely different in character, as in the career which awaited them. The simple-hearted scholar whose holy happy life flowed calmly on from childhood to old age within his convent walls, like some quiet stream that never overpasses its verdant banks, is a contrast indeed to the great apostle who, after having evangelised half Europe, and ruled the churches of France and Germany, as Vicar of the Vicar of Christ, with a spiritual sway larger than any ever exercised save by the successors of St. Peter, died, as was fitting, a martyr’s death, saluting with his parting words the joy and glory of that “long-expected day.”[62] Yet both in different ways exhibit to us the noblest features of the Anglo-Saxon race, whose simple piety and strong good sense are as apparent in Bede, as the ardour of its active charity is in Boniface. He was a native then, not of the bleak and hardy north, but of the softer climate of that southern province, Where the salt sea innocuously breaks, And the sea-breeze as innocently plays On Devon’s leafy shores. It took its name from the deep hollows where the apple-blossoms clustered as thickly then as now, and the clematis wove its tangled wreaths in as wild profusion over bank and wood. Still covered with those grand primeval forests which made perpetual shadow in its pathless valleys, and, fearless of the billows that lost their fierceness as they broke upon that gentle shore, clothed even the purple rocks themselves with verdure, and bent their branches into the briny waves, it merited to receive from St. Aldhelm the title of _dire Dumnonia_. Perhaps he could not resist the tempting alliteration, or perhaps the wooded hollows of Devonshire oppressed with their leafy gloom the senses of the traveller who, as he tells us, had just passed over the barren hills of “Cornwall, void of flowery turf.” It formed the border-land of English Saxony, and touched on that unfriendly territory still inhabited by the Britons, who saw in the newly converted Saxons only a race of giants and savages, with whom they refused to hold any intercourse.