Benedict Biscop, the contemporary of the chivalrous Wilfrid of York, is eminently a representative of Anglo‐Saxon cultivation. Montalembert puts his name in the “monastic constellation of the seventh century” for intelligence, art, and science. He it was who undertook a journey to Rome (which place he had visited many times before on other errands) solely to procure books; and it must be borne in mind that this journey was then twice as long and a hundred times more dangerous than a journey from London to Australia is now. After having founded the Abbey of Wearmouth, at the mouth of the Wear, Benedict set forth again, bringing masons and glass‐makers from Gaul to teach the Anglo‐Saxons some notions of solid and ornamental architecture. He was a passionate book‐collector, and wished each of his monasteries to have a great library, which he considered indispensable to the discipline, instruction, and good organization of the community. Originally a monk at Lerins, whither he had gone after giving up a knightly and seignorial career in his own country, he naturally drank in that thirst for learning which, in the earlier middle ages, seems to have been almost inseparable from holiness. Jarrow, the sister monastery to Wearmouth, situated near it by the mouth of the Tyne, was even yet more famous as a school of hallowed knowledge, and has become endeared to the hearts of all Englishmen as the home of the Venerable Bede. His is a figure which, even in the foreign annals of the church, stands pre‐eminent among ecclesiastical writers, and one in whom the Anglo‐Saxon character is thoroughly and beautifully revealed. Calm and steadfast self‐possession, that beautiful attribute of the followers of the “Prince of Peace,” is the key‐note to the writings of the historian‐monk of Jarrow. The first glimpse we have of him is as the solitary companion of the new‐made abbot, Ceolfrid, chanting the divine office at the age of seven; his voice choked with sobs as he thought of the elder brethren, all of whom a grievous pestilence had carried off. But though the choir had gone to join in the hymns of the New Jerusalem, the canonical hours were nevertheless kept up by the sorrowing abbot and the child‐chorister until new brethren came to take the place of the old ones. Bede was never idle; he says himself that “he was always his own secretary, and dictated, composed, and copied all himself.” His great history was the means of bringing him into contact with the best men of his day. “The details he gives on this subject show that a constant communication was kept up between the principal centres of religious life, and that an amount of intellectual activity as surprising as it is admirable—when the difficulty of communication and the internal wars which ravaged England are taken into account—existed among their inhabitants.”(48) Bede’s political foresight seems to have been of no mean order, and the grave advice he administers to bishops on ecclesiastical