A French historian comments on this characteristic of old cloister chronicles, that the obscurest event of the cloister holds in them as conspicuous a place as the greatest revolutions in history. For instance, in a chronicle cited by him of the year of grace 732, which produced the battle of Poictiers, whereby Charles Martel arrested the vast invasion of Islamism, not a line is vouchsafed to that event. In fact, the year is passed over without notice, as containing nothing really deserving of notice. But beside a date expressly given, we read, “Martin est mort,”—Martin being an unknown monk of the Abbey of Corvey; and, farther on again, “Charles, maire du palais, est mort.” Martin was an unknown monk, and he died. Charles Martel was mayor of the palace, and the conqueror at Poictiers, and he died. Well remarks M. Demogeot, that “tous les hommes deviennent egaux devant la secheresse laconique de ces premiers chroniqueurs.” “We must all go, that is certain,” writes Mrs. Piozzi to Sir James Fellows, “and ’tis the only thing that _is_ certain. Καὶ ἀπεθανε ends all the cases Dr. James quotes from your old friend Hippocrates.” All the physician’s cases have the same terminal affix, AND HE DIED. Very long-lived some of them may be; but, as Mr. Browning puts it in his fine poem of “Saul,” “But the licence of age has its limit; thou diest at last.” We are told of St. Anschar, whose missionary career in Sweden is commemorated in Milman’s “Latin Christianity,” that the ardour of youth had begun to relax his strict austerity of monastic discipline, when all at once the world was startled by the tidings of Charlemagne’s death. That the mighty sovran of so many kingdoms must suffer the common lot, struck young Anschar as something beyond the common; and from that hour he lived in the world as not of it, and bore on his way through it as verily a stranger and a pilgrim upon earth, with serious work to do, but working in and walking by faith, not sight. Marcus Antoninus, in his self-communings, bids himself consider how many physicians are dead that used to value themselves upon the cure of their patients, and how many astrologers who thought themselves great men by foretelling the deaths of others; how many warriors, who had knocked out the brains of thousands upon thousands; and how many tyrants who managed the power of life and death with as much rigour as if they had been themselves immortal.