The unsatisfactory character of this portion of English history is no doubt partly due to the fact that at an early stage we lose the guidance of that great writer to whom we are indebted for almost all that gives freshness and life to the preceding narratives. Bede, the father of English history, finished his great work in 731, and died four years later, in 735. Hitherto he has been speaking to us about the lives of other men; it is now time to listen to what his disciples have told us concerning his own. Born about the year 672, soon after the death of Oswy, Bede was taken as a child of seven years old to the newly founded monastery of Monkwearmouth, and there or in the sister monastery of Jarrow he passed the rest of his life. He was thus not only the child of the convent but in a pre-eminent degree the spiritual heir of Benedict Biscop, the nobly born and cultured Northumbrian, who had founded these two monasteries, had built in their precincts two stately stone churches “after the manner of the Romans which he always loved” (far superior doubtless to the uncouth wooden churches which satisfied most of the Anglo-Saxon builders), had enriched their libraries with precious manuscripts and pictures--the trophies of five journeys to Rome--and had imported artisans from Gaul to teach the Anglo-Saxon the hitherto unknown mystery of the manufacture of glass. It is an interesting fact that of both these two foundations of Benedict Biscop some vestiges still remain, almost unique specimens of early Anglo-Saxon art. In the porch of the parish church of Monkwearmouth are some cylindrical “baluster-shafts,” and some slabs covered with beautiful Anglo-Saxon knot-work. In the parish church of Jarrow, surrounded as it now is by smoking furnaces and clanging steam-hammers, there are portions of a wall undoubtedly anterior to the Norman conquest, and possibly belonging to the very fabric which, as an inscription tells us, was dedicated in the fifteenth year of king Egfrid and the fourth year of abbot Ceolfrid (probably 685). Under this abbot, who ruled Wearmouth as well as Jarrow, Bede spent more than thirty years of his life, the years of boyhood, youth and early middle age. With him, according to the pathetic story already related, he probably sustained as a boy of fourteen the whole burden of chanting the antiphones, when all the rest of the choir were laid low by the terrible pestilence. By him doubtless his studies were directed in later life, when as a studious youth he entered the convent library and began to pore over the manuscripts, sacred and profane, the splendid copies of the Vulgate, the treatises of the Fathers, the poems of Lucretius, Horace, Ovid and Virgil, wherewith the literary enthusiasm of Benedict had enriched his monastery.