e mornings, and
the evenings were taken up by friends who called to see him.[10]
Sulpicius answered, that an indisposition had hindered him from
undertaking that journey. Of the several letters mentioned by Gennadius,
which Sulpicius Severus wrote to the devout virgin Claudia, his sister,
two are published by Baluze.[11] Both are strong exhortations to fervor
and perseverance. In the first, our saint assures her that he shed tears
of joy in reading her letter, by which he was assured of her sincere
desire of serving God. In a letter to Aurelius the deacon, he relates
that one night in a dream he saw St. Martin ascend to heaven in great
glory, and attended by the holy priest Clarus, his disciple, who was
lately dead: soon after, two monks arriving from Tours, brought news of
the death of St. Martin. He adds, that his greatest comfort in the loss
of so good a master, was a confidence that he should obtain the divine
blessings by the prayers of St. Martin in heaven. St. Paulinus mentions
this vision in an inscription in verse, which he made and sent to be
engraved on the marble altar of the church of Primuliacus.[12] St.
Sulpicius wrote the life of the incomparable St. Martin, according to
Tillemont and most others, before the death of that saint: but De Prato
thinks, that though it was begun before, it was neither finished nor
published till after his death. The style of this piece is plainer and
more simple than that of his other writings. An account of the death of
St. Martin, which is placed by De Prato in the year 400, is accurately
given by St. Sulpicius in a letter to Bassula, his mother-ill-law, who
then lived at Triers. The three dialogues of our saint are the most
florid of all his writings. In the first Posthumian, a friend who had
spent three years in the deserts of Egypt and the East, and was then
returned, relates to him and Gallus, a disciple of St. Martin, (with
whom our saint then lived under the same roof,) the wonderful examples
of virtue he had seen abroad. In the second dialogue, Gallus recounts
{305} many circumstances of the life of St. Martin, which St. Sulpicius
had omitted in his history of that saint. In the third, under the name
of the same Gallus, several miracles wrought by St. Martin are proved by
authentic testimonies.[13] The most important work of our saint is his
abridgment of sacred history from the beginning of the world down to his
own time, in the year 400. The elegance, conciseness, an