In 716 the abbot Ceolfrid, in the seventy-fifth year of his age, resigned his office and started on a pilgrimage to Rome. He travelled slowly, and had only reached the city of Langres in Champagne, when the weakness of age conquered him, and he lay down and died. His attempted pilgrimage has, however, a special interest for us, since it has recently been discovered that one of the manuscripts which he took with him on his journey as an offering to the Holy Father was none other than the celebrated Codex Amiatinus, now preserved in the Laurentian Library, at Florence and, by the admission of all scholars, the chief authority for the text of Jerome’s great translation of the Scriptures. Bede survived his old preceptor nearly twenty years, following up with patient industry the literary career upon which Ceolfrid had started him. In 731 he completed the great work on _The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation_, which has made his name immortal; but besides this he wrote a vast number of treatises: on _The Interpretation of Scripture_, on _The Nature of Things_, on _Grammar_ and on _Astronomy_, and two chronological works entitled _De Temporibus_ and _De Temporum Ratione_. His books show an especial interest in the computation of time, the natural result of his study of the great Easter controversy, the echoes of which must have been still resounding in the days of his childhood. He was unquestionably the most learned man of his age, perhaps one might safely say the most learned man of the early Middle Ages. He was--what even the great Pope Gregory was not--a Greek scholar; and his Latin style, formed doubtless on a careful study of the classical authors in the library of the convent, is eminently pure, and free from turgidity and affectation. His history, in fact, comes as a delightful surprise to the student who has had to struggle with the barbarous Latinity of papal epistles, or the astounding grammatical blunders of Bede’s Frankish counterpart, Gregory of Tours. All this intellectual attainment on the part of the monk of Jarrow is the more surprising when we remember how short was the interval which separated him from actual barbarism. Bede’s father possibly, his grandfather almost certainly, were rude illiterate pagans; yet we find their near descendant writing Latin which might almost have passed muster at the court of Augustus, and by his saintly life and happy death illustrating the noblest qualities of the Christian character. Bede’s life ended on May 9, 735. Though the story of his death is one of the best known in English history, it may hardly be omitted here. For some months before the end he had suffered much from difficulty of breathing. The long and weary night watches were gladdened with psalmody; sometimes with the repetition of his own Anglo-Saxon verses, one of which may be thus translated:--