Beda.
We might, however, never have known anything of Cædmon and of Saint Hilda and all the monasteries north and south, except for another worthy who grew up in the hearing of the waves which beat on the cliffs of north-eastern England. This was Beda,—respected in his own day for his industry, piety, straightforward honesty—and so followed by the respect of succeeding generations as to get and carry the name of the Venerable Beda. Though familiar with the people’s language,[10] and with Greek, he wrote in monkish Latin—redeemed by classic touches—and passed his life in the monastery at Jarrow, which is on the Tyne, near the coast of Durham, a little to the westward of South Shields. An ancient church is still standing amid the ruins of the monastic walls, and a heavy, straight-backed chair of oak (which would satisfy the most zealous antiquarian by its ugliness) is still guarded in the chancel, and is called Beda’s Chair.
Six hundred pupils gathered about him there, in the old days, to be taught in physics, grammar, rhetoric, music, and I know not what besides. So learned and true was he, that the Pope would have called him to Rome; but he loved better the wooded Tyne banks, and the gray moorlands, and the labors of his own monastery. There he lived out an honest, a plodding, an earnest, and a hopeful life. And as I read the sympathetic story of its end, and of how the old man—his work all done—lifted up a broken voice—on his last day—amidst his scholars, to the Gloria in Excelsis—I bethink me of his last eulogist, the young historian, who within a few months only after sketching that tender picture of his great forerunner in the paths of British history, laid down his brilliant pen—his work only half done, and died, away from his home, at Mentone, on the shores of the Mediterranean.