Dean Stanley's remarks upon him, are so very beautiful and appropriate, that we may be pardoned for extracting some of them:--"Two names only from the Anglo Saxon period are still held in unquestioned and universal reverence. One is the Great Alfred, the illustrious king and lawgiver, in the south of England; the other is Bede, the venerable father of English history and English learning, in the North of England. Venerable he truly was. We need not go back to the legend which supposed that he received the title from the Roman Senate for having solved a strange riddle which they could not answer; nor to the other legend, which tells us that, on his grave-stone at Durham, you can still read the inscription in which it is said that an angel in the night filled up the blank space with _Venerabilis_. He is venerable for the much more solid reason, that he has won the veneration of all Englishmen--we may say of all the world--as an example of the faithful student of truth. His old oaken chair at Jarrow may be still chipped away, as it has been for many years, for healing relics. But no miracle, no wonder, is ever recorded of him in his lifetime. Nay, he was even accused before the Archbishop of York, on a charge of heresy on account of some of his views on chronology. He never was formally acknowledged as a saint. Yet in spite of this, the instinct of mankind has gradually given to him the superiority and pre-eminence over those eccentric missionaries whose wonders for the moment dazzled, but whose special work has long ago passed away. A foreign ambassador (says Fuller) visited the high sumptuous shrine of St. Cuthbert: '_If_ thou be a saint, pray for us;' then turning to the plain, lowly, little tomb of Bede, he said, '_Because_ thou art a saint, good Bede, pray for us." "His last days were spent in the noblest of tasks--in the task which afterwards engaged the best days of Luther and the best days of Wickliffe, that of translating the Bible into his own language. 'I am unwilling,' he said, 'that my children should read what is not true, and should, after my death, in this matter, spend their labours to no profit. That is the fine sentiment of a man who really cares for truth, and really cares for his country.