lesiastical chant was derived from a
Roman cantor whom Pope Vitalian sent in the train of Benedict Biscop.
Little by little the young scholar thus made himself master of the whole
range of the science of his time; he became, as Burke rightly styled him,
"the father of English learning." The tradition of the older classic
culture was first revived for England in his quotations of Plato and
Aristotle, of Seneca and Cicero, of Lucretius and Ovid. Virgil cast over
him the same spell that he cast over Dante; verses from the AEneid break
his narratives of martyrdoms, and the disciple ventures on the track of
the great master in a little eclogue descriptive of the approach of
spring. His work was done with small aid from others. "I am my own
secretary," he writes; "I make my own notes. I am my own librarian." But
forty-five works remained after his death to attest his prodigious
industry. In his own eyes and those of his contemporaries the most
important among these were the commentaries and homilies upon various
books of the Bible which he had drawn from the writings of the Fathers.
But he was far from confining himself to theology. In treatises compiled
as textbooks for his scholars, Baeda threw together all that the world had
then accumulated in astronomy and meteorology, in physics and music, in
philosophy, grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, medicine. But the encyclopaedic
character of his researches left him in heart a simple Englishman. He
loved his own English tongue, he was skilled in English song, his last
work was a translation into English of the Gospel of St. John, and almost
the last words that broke from his lips were some English rimes upon
death.

But the noblest proof of his love of England lies in the work which
immortalizes his name. In his "Ecclesiastical History of the English
Nation," Baeda was at once the founder of mediaeval history and the first
English historian. All that we really know of the century and a half that
follows the landing of Augustine we know from him. Wherever his own
personal observation extended, the story is told with admirable detail
and force. He is hardly less full or accurate in the portions which he
owed to his Kentish friends, Albinus and Nothelm. What he owed to no
informant was his exquisite faculty of story-telling, and yet no story of
his own telling is so touching as the story of his death. Two weeks
before the Easter of 735 the old man was seized with an extreme weakness
and