wn to pray with him, but by his silence soon perceived he was
dead. Having paid his last respects to the holy corpse, he carried it
out of the cave. While he stood perplexed how to dig a grave, two lions
came up quietly, and, as it were, mourning; and tearing up the ground,
made a hole large enough for the reception of a human body. St. Antony
then buried the corpse, singing hymns and psalms, according to what was
usual and appointed by the church on that occasion. After this he
returned home praising God, and related to his monks what he had seen
and done. He always kept as a great treasure, and wore himself on great
festivals, the garment of St. Paul, of palm-tree leaves patched
together. St. Paul died in the year of our Lord 342, the hundred and
thirteenth year of his age, and the ninetieth of his solitude, and is
usually called the _first hermit_, to distinguish him from others of
that name. The body of this saint is said to have been conveyed to
Constantinople, by the emperor Michael Comnenus, in the twelfth century,
and from thence to Venice in 1240.[4] Lewis I., king of Hungary,
procured it from that republic, and deposited it at Buda, where a
congregation of hermits under his name, which still subsists in Hungary,
Poland, and Austria, was instituted by blessed Eusebius of Strigonium, a
nobleman, who, having distributed his whole estate among the poor,
retired into the forests; and being followed by others, built the
monastery of Pisilia, under the rule of the regular canons of St.
Austin. He died in that house, January the 20th, 1270.

St. Paul, the hermit, is commemorated in several ancient western
Martyrologies on the 10th of January, but in the Roman on the 15th, on
which he is honored in the anthologium of the Greeks.

* * * * *

An eminent contemplative draws the following portraiture of this great
model of an eremitical life:[5] St. Paul, the hermit, not being called
by God to the external duties of an active life, remained alone,
conversing only with God, in a vast wilderness, for the space of near a
hundred years, ignorant of all that passed in the world, both the
progress of sciences, the establishment of religion, and the revolutions
of states and empires; indifferent even as to those things without which
he could not live, as the air which he breathed, the water he drank, and
the miraculous bread with which he supported life. What did he do? say
the inhabitants of this