abuses shows at once his practical common sense and fearlessness of character. He also condemns the too sweeping grants of land, exemptions from taxes, and privileges offered to monastic houses, and gives the wisest reasons for his strictures. “The nations of Catholic Europe envied England the possession of so great a doctor, the first among the offspring of barbarous races who had won a place among the doctors of the church, ... and his illustrious successor Alcuin, speaking to the community of Jarrow which Bede had made famous, bears witness to his celebrity in these words: ‘Stir up, then, the minds of your sleepers by his example; study his works, and you will be able to draw from them the secret of eternal beauty.’ ”(49) Malmesbury was another Anglo‐Saxon centre of thought, and the memory of S. Aldhelm long gave it that “powerful and popular existence which lasted far into the middle ages.”(50) The cathedral school of York, “which rose into celebrity just as Bede was withdrawn from the scene of his useful labors,”(51) produced one of the greatest of English scholars, and one instrumental in carrying knowledge acquired among monks to the warrior court of a foreign prince. Charlemagne and his Palatine schools of Aix‐la‐ Chapelle would have been shorn of half their glory had it not been for the Englishman Alcuin. But it was not without a pang that the home‐loving master left the school he had almost formed, and which he cherished as the product of his first efforts, and undertook to foster the same institutions in a strange land. These schools, in which enthusiastic French writers love to trace the germ of the mighty University of Paris, seem to have possessed a system of equality very creditable both to their master and their imperial patron. Later on, when the wearied _magister_ at last wrested from Charlemagne the permission to retire into some monastery, since he had failed in obtaining leave to return and die at York, it was only to found another school that he occupied his leisure. S. Martin’s at Tours now became as famous as the Palatine at Aix‐la‐Chapelle. “He applied himself to his new duties with unabated energy, and by his own teaching raised the school of Tours to a renown which was shared by none of its contemporaries. In the hall of studies, a distinct place was set apart for the copyists, who were exhorted by certain verses of their master, set up in a conspicuous place, _to mind their stops and not to leave out letters_.”(52) Here, then, is another of those pleasant little details which creates a fellow‐feeling between the human nature of to‐day and that of past ages. The description of his life from which we have drawn this sketch closes thus: “In short, his active mind, thoroughly Anglo‐Saxon in its temper, worked on to the end; laboring at a sublime end by homely practical details. One sees he is of the same race with Bede, who wrote and dictated to the last hour of his life, and, when his work