From his monastic life onwards Gregory seems to have suffered from bad health, due in part, probably, to his extreme asceticism while living in his monastery. During the last few years of his life he was in continual pain from gout, which makes his activity and his achievements still more astonishing. For long he was confined to his bed altogether. He died on March 12th, 604. In contrast to the enthusiasm with which his accession to the Papacy was greeted, he was now accused by the fickle population of having caused the famine, which was then raging, by his lavish expenditure, though the latter was largely due to the charitable relief which he habitually gave to alleviate the distress which prevailed all the time that he filled the Papal chair. But he was canonized after his death by universal consent in the West, and the Council of Cloveshoo, in 747, fixed the 12th of March for his veneration: "That the birthday of the blessed Pope Gregory, and also the day of the burial of St. Augustine the Archbishop and Confessor (who being sent to the English by the said Pope, our father Gregory, first brought the knowledge of the Faith, the sacrament of Baptism, and the notice of the Heavenly Country), which is the 26th of May, be honourably observed by all: so that each day be kept with a cessation from labour, by ecclesiastics and monastics; and that the name of our blessed father and doctor Augustine be always mentioned in singing the Litany after the invocation of St. Gregory." [Illustration: St. Gregory, from Antiphoner of Hartker of St. Gall] THE GREGORIAN TRADITION. The tradition that St. Gregory reformed the Plainsong of his day, especially that of the Antiphonale Missarum, seems to have been held universally till 1675, when Pierre Gussanville brought out an edition of Gregory's works, in which he threw doubts on the tradition. He was followed in 1729 by George, Baron d' Eckhart, a friend of Leibnitz, who put forward the theory that it was Gregory II., and not Gregory I., who had done this work. In 1772, at Venice, a new edition of Gregory's works was published by Gallicciolli; and in this were reproduced the arguments of Eckhart, leaving the question open for future investigation. Nothing more was heard of the theory till 1882, when, at the Congress of Arezzo, some speakers reproduced the doubts of Eckhart and Gallicciolli.