lay in learning, or teaching, or writing.”
The words sketch for us a scholar’s life, the
more touching in its simplicity that it is the life
of the first great English scholar. The quiet
grandeur of a life consecrated to knowledge, the tranquil
pleasure that lies in learning and teaching and writing,
dawned for Englishmen in the story of Baeda. While
still young, he became teacher, and six hundred monks,
besides strangers that flocked thither for instruction,
formed his school of Jarrow. It is hard to imagine
how, among the toils of the schoolmaster and the duties
of the monk, Baeda could have found time for the composition
of the numerous works that made his name famous in
the West. But materials for study had accumulated
in Northumbria through the journeys of Wilfrith and
Benedict Biscop, and Archbishop Eegberht was forming
the first English library at York. The tradition
of the older Irish teachers still lingered to direct
the young scholar into that path of scriptural interpretation
to which he chiefly owed his fame. Greek, a rare
accomplishment in the West, came to him from the school
which the Greek Archbishop Theodore founded beneath
the walls of Canterbury. His skill in the ecclesiastical
chaunt was derived from a Roman cantor whom Pope Vilalian
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
text-books 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 rhymes upon death.