At the time that Aristides was banished, when the people were inscribing the names on the shells, it is reported that an illiterate burgher came to Aristides, whom he took for some ordinary person, and, giving him his shell, desired him to write Aristides upon it. The good man, surprised at the adventure, asked him "Whether Aristides had ever injured him?" "No," said he, "nor do I even know him; but it vexes me to hear him everywhere called _the Just_." Aristides made no answer, but took the shell, and having written his own name upon it, returned it to the man. When he quitted Athens, he lifted up his hands towards heaven, and, agreeably to his character, made a prayer, very different from that of Achilles; namely, "That the people of Athens might never see the day which should force them to remember Aristides." _Plutarch's Lives_. [Notes: _Aristides_. A prominent citizen of Athens (about the year 490 B.C.) opposed to the more advanced policy of Themistocles, who wished to make the city rely entirely upon her naval power. He was ostracised in 489, but afterwards restored. _Marathon_. The victory gained over the Persian invaders, 490 B.C.] * * * * * THE VENERABLE BEDE. Baeda--the venerable Bede as later times styled him--was born about ten years after the Synod of Whitby, beneath the shade of a great abbey which Benedict Biscop was rearing by the mouth of the Wear. His youth was trained and his long tranquil life was wholly spent in an offshoot of Benedict's house which was founded by his scholar Ceolfrid. Baeda never stirred from Jarrow. "I spent my whole life in the same monastery," he says, "and while attentive to the rule of my order and the service of the Church, my constant pleasure lay in learning, or teaching, or writing." The words sketch for us a scholar's life, the more touching in its simplicity that it is the life of the first great English scholar. The quiet grandeur of a life consecrated to knowledge, the tranquil pleasure that lies in learning and teaching and writing, dawned for Englishmen in the story of Baeda. While still young, he became teacher, and six hundred monks, besides strangers that flocked thither for instruction, formed his school of Jarrow. It is hard to imagine how, among the toils of the schoolmaster and the duties of the monk, Baeda could have found time for the composition of the numerous works that made his name famous in the West. But materials for study had accumulated in Northumbria through the journeys of Wilfrith and Benedict Biscop, and Archbishop Eegberht was forming the first English library at York. The tradition of the older Irish teachers still lingered to direct the young scholar into that path of scriptural interpretation to which he chiefly owed his fame. Greek, a rare accomplishment in the West, came to him from the school which the Greek Archbishop Theodore founded beneath the walls of Canterbury.