Prudentius undoubtedly exhibits the early traces of observances which are peculiar to the Roman Catholic Church. In one of his hymns (the _Cultor Dei memento_) he advises that the sign of the cross be made upon the forehead and above the heart: “Frontem locumque cordis Crucis figura signet.” But we have not the space, nor is this the proper occasion, to follow him through those matters which belong to the church historian more than to the hymnologist. We must leave him to end his days in undisturbed quiet, a good deal after the manner of Chaucer, as indeed we have already hinted. He is said to have died in the neighborhood of the year 405 in Spain. Our information is largely conjectural and affords us no certainty about his closing years. That a poet who still dwelt amid the sculptured coldness of the pagan past should have written such hymns, is a proof of what Christianity was then achieving. She had banished from the chilly apartments of literature the ancient _focus_ with its feeble charcoal and its mephitic smoke. Instead of this she had created the cheerful _hearth_, on which a pure fire of devotion was kindled and whose ascending flame swept off the immoral vapors of the time. Prudentius, in a word, made scholarship and religion companions instead of enemies; and brightened classic prosody by the presence of a living faith. To Prudentius also more hymns have been ascribed than he ever wrote, but after these have been weeded out, there are left: _Ales diei nuntius_, _Nox et tenebrae et nubila_, _Sol ecce surgit igneus_, _Intende nostris sensibus_, _O crucifer bone, lucisator_, _Pastis visceribus, ciboque sumpto_, _Inventor rutili dux bone luminis_, _Ades pater supreme_, _Cultor Dei memento_, _O Nazarene lux Bethlem verbum Patris_, _In Ninivitas se coactus percito_, _Christe servorum regimen tuorum_, _Da puer plectrum_, _Corde natus ex parentis_, _Deus ignee fons animarum_, _Jam moesta quiesce querela_, _Quid est quod arctum circulum_, _Quicumque Christum quaeritis_, _O sola magnarum urbium_, _Audit tyrannus anxius_, _Salvete flores martyrum_, _Qui ter quaternus denique_, _Felix terra quae Fructuoso vestiris_, _Lux ecce surgit aurea_, _En martyris Laurentii_, _Beate martyr prospera_, _Noctis terrae primordia_, _Obsidionis obvias_, _Hymnum Mariae Virginis_, _Germine nobilis Eulalia_, _Scripta sunt coelo duorum_, _Innumeros cineres sanctorum_. CHAPTER VII. ENNODIUS, BISHOP OF PAVIA.