desire. By placing herself, as a docile scholar, continually at
the feet of the Divine Majesty, who filled all the powers of her soul
with the sweetness of his heavenly communications, she learned that
sublime science of perfection in which she became a mistress to so many
other chaste souls by this divine exercise. Her life in her retirement,
to that happy moment which closed her mortal pilgrimage, was a continued
uniform contemplation, by which all her powers were united to, and
transformed into God.

Footnotes:
1. This nunnery underwent the same fate with the abbey of Mount
Cassino, both being burnt to the ground by the Lombards. When
Rachim, king of that nation, having been converted to the Catholic
faith by the exhortations of pope Zachary, re-established that
abbey, and taking the monastic habit, ended his life there, his
queen Tasai and his daughter Ratruda rebuilt and richly endowed the
nunnery of Plombariola, in which they lived with great regularity to
their deaths, as is related by Leo of Ostia in his Chronicle of
Mount Cassino, ad an. 750. It has been since destroyed, so that at
present the land is only a farm belonging to the monastery of Mount
Cassino. See Dom Mege, Vie de St. Benoit, p. 412. Chatelain, Notes,
p. 605. Murarori, Antichita, &c. t. 3. p. 400. Diss. 66, del
Monasteri delle Monache.
2. See Paul the deacon, Hist. Longob. and Dom Mege, Vie de St. Benoit,
p. 48.
3. That the relics of St. Bennet were privately carried off from Mount
Cassino, in 660, soon after the monastery was destroyed, and brought
to Fleury on the Loire by Algiulph the monk, and those of St.
Scholastica, by certain persons of Mans to that city, is maintained
by Mabillon, Menard, and Bosche. But that the relics of both these
saints still remain at Mount Cassino, is strenuously affirmed by
Loretus Angelus de Nuce, and Marchiarelli, the late learned monk of
the Order of Camaldoli: and this assertion Benedict XIV. looks upon
as certain, (de Canoniz. l. 4, part 2, c. 24, t, 4, p. 245.) For
pope Zachary in his bull assures us, that he devoutly honored the
relics of SS. Benedict and Scholastica, at Mount Cassino, in 746.
Leo Ostiensis and Peter the deacon visited them and found them
untouched in 1071, as Alexander II. affirms in the bull he published
when he consecrated the new church there. By careful visitations
made by au