At Oxyrhynchus was found also a school-boy’s letter to his father, an example of the immutability of basal human nature. It is in Greek, on papyrus, written in the second or third century of our era. This is part of it: “Theon to his father Theon greeting. It was a fine thing of you not to take me with you to town.... Mother said to Archelaüs ‘He upsets me: take him away.’ So send for me, I implore you. If you won’t send, I won’t eat, I won’t drink: there now.” The appeal to what his mother said about him to a house-friend, was a master stroke, the boy thought, but the effect may have been diminished in his father’s eyes by the undoubted fact that the grammar and spelling of the letter leave a good deal to be desired. That completes the picture. But we may be pretty sure that no tragedy followed the missive. Having done his best to bring his father into the right path the youthful Theon undoubtedly sat down to a good dinner and calmly awaited the course of events. A chilling interval no doubt followed, and a prosaic reply that Theon had better keep his temper and not upset his mother. Little did Theon think that his boyish letter would, after seventeen hundred years, become an interesting treasure in a great library. [Sidenote: Cædmon.] The earliest personal name in the long range of English Literature is Cædmon, the herdman of Whitby, in the seventh century. The only ancient MS. of Cædmon’s metrical paraphrase of parts of the Old Testament is the Junius MS. in the Bodleian, written in England about the year 1000, and illustrated by a native pre-Conquest artist. The question of how much of the MS. is Cædmon’s own composition cannot be here dealt with, but part corresponds closely with a prose version written in the eighth century and contained in a Cambridge MS. of Bede, and the _Genesis_ part of the present MS. is known to be of Northumbrian origin. Much of the interest lies in the pen-and-ink drawings which illustrate the _Genesis_. For instance, the ark is represented by a set of boxes erected on the deck of the largest vessel which the artist had ever seen, namely a Scandinavian war-galley with its turned up fore- and sternposts and its side steering. Out of the boxes peer the animals and birds, while the steersman has an aspect of lofty detachment which should do credit to an artist of the present day. There is no pseudo-archaism in the illustrations, but an invaluable record of buildings, costumes and life in England, half a century before the Conquest. [Sidenote: Bede’s Acts of the Apostles.]