Of the writings which he has left to us, the principal are the life of Epiphanius; another of Antonius of Pannonia, a hermit at Lake Como and then a monk at Lerins; together with a _Eucharisticum de Vita sua_ and the apology and panegyric mentioned above. Add to these nine books of letters, “weighed down with emptiness,” and various itineraries, declamations, and poetical pieces, and you have all he did. The letters are most unsatisfactory when we remember that he was the friend, and perhaps the relative, of men like Boethius, Faustus, Avienus, Caesar of Arles, Aurelian, and of bishops and other prelates without number, and lived in Italy under the great Theodoric. He is utterly lacking in contemporary portraits, and his accounts of his three journeys give us nothing valuable. All is stilted, unnatural, and dull. He was not much of a traveller at best. A trip into Burgundy, another across the Po to see his sister, and one from Rome by sea, make up the list of which he kept any trace in his writings. He is in no haste to detail the sayings and doings at Constantinople! But it should be said that these performances with the pen were previous to his elevation to the mitre. Afterward he doubtless composed only hymns and epigrams—the hymns being decent and the epigrams very much the reverse. The German scholar Teuffel looks upon his productions as an “important source of history” for some enigmatic reason of his own, but Simcox very justly scouts them; and the Romanist Berington asserts that he rises “with weariness” from their perusal. I must personally declare that they exhibit neither skill, taste, nor information. They are jejune and empty to a marvellous degree; and for complication of sentences and unclassical phraseology, they are equal to the stupidest books of a later day. And nothing worse than this can be said by any critic. The _Eucharisticum_ is an insincere sort of thanksgiving for his restoration to health, and very far behind the style of Augustine which it copies. It gives us a few particulars of his personal history, but it is prosaic and Pharisaic, and full of a mock humble glorification of the blessed Victor the Martyr, by whose intercession he is now convalescent. The hymns are a trifle more hopeful, and really merit our notice. They are by no means the “dozen tame hymns” of which Simcox speaks so contemptuously. There are sixteen of them and three are quite good. Here, for instance, is the _Christe lumen perpetuum_: “O Christ, the eternal light Of every sun and sphere, Illumine thou our mortal night And keep our spirits clear. “Let nothing evil smite, Nor enemy invade; And let us stainless be, and white, By nothing base betrayed. “Guard thou the hearts of all, But chiefly of thine own; And hold us, that we may not fall, Through thy great might alone. “That so our souls may sing, When favoring light they see; And every vow and tribute bring To God in Trinity.”