“Death speaks to man: ’For thee was a house built ere thou wast born; for thee was a mould shapen ere thou camest of thy mother. Its height is not determined, nor its depth measured, nor is it closed up (however long it may be) until I bring thee where thou shalt remain, until I shall measure thee and the sod of earth. Thy house is not highly built, it is unhigh and low; when thou art in it the heelways are low, the sideways low. The roof is built full nigh thy breast; so thou shalt dwell in earth full cold, dim, and dark. Doorless is that house, and dark it is within; there thou art fast prisoner, and Death holds the key. Loathly is that earth-house, and grim to dwell in; there thou shalt dwell, and worms shall share thee. Thus thou art laid, and leavest thy friends; thou hast no friend that will come to thee, who will ever inquire how that house liketh thee, who shall ever open the door for thee, and seek thee, for soon thou becomest loathly and hateful to look upon.’” The composition is not by Aldhelm, who, probably, never heard of it. All of Aldhelm’s Anglo-Saxon MSS. perished when the magnificent monastery at Malmesbury was sacked under Henry VIII. The Protestant historian, Maitland, thus tells the story: “The precious MSS. of his [Aldhelm’s] library were long employed to fill up broken windows in the neighboring houses, or to light the bakers’ fires.” All that we know of _The Grave_ is that it was found written in the margin of a volume of Anglo-Saxon homilies, preserved in the Bodleian Library. It is of a period following Aldhelm’s era, and is in the dialect of East Anglia, while Aldhelm was of Wessex. But M. Taine himself demonstrates that it could not be Aldhelm’s. At page 50, he tells us Aldhelm died in 709, having previously stated (p. 46) that the fragment “was one of the last Anglo-Saxon compositions.” But among the finest Anglo-Saxon poetical compositions are the celebrated _Ormulum_, and various poems by Layamon, which were written about the year 1225. _The Grave_, moreover, so far from containing “a terrible Christianity,” has so essentially the tone and spirit of many well-known Catholic meditations on death, that it might have been written in a Spanish monastery or taken from a book of Christian devotions. Of course, “the poor monks” can do nothing creditable in M. Taine’s eyes, and he comes to sad grief in undertaking to go, by specification, beyond the common counts of the ordinary declaration dictated by bigotry. At page 53, vol. i., he thus refers in contemptuous terms to the monks who compiled the _Saxon Chronicle_: “They spun out awkwardly and heavily dry chronicles, a sort of historical almanacs. You might think them peasants, who, returning from their toil, came and scribbled with chalk on a smoky table the date of a year of scarcity, the price of corn, the changes in the weather, a death.”