It is not wholly unworthy of observation, that Providence, which strongly appears to have intended the continual intermixture of mankind, never leaves the human mind destitute of a principle to effect it.  This purpose is sometimes carried on by a sort of migratory instinct, sometimes by the spirit of conquest; at one time avarice drives men from their homes, at another they are actuated by a thirst of knowledge; where none of these causes can operate, the sanctity of particular places attracts men from the most distant quarters.  It was this motive which sent thousands in those ages to Jerusalem and Rome, and now, in a full tide, impels half the world annually to Mecca.

By those voyages the seeds of various kinds of knowledge and improvement were at different times imported into England.  They were cultivated in the leisure and retirement of monasteries; otherwise they could not have been cultivated at all:  for it was altogether necessary to draw certain men from the general rude and fierce society, and wholly to set a bar between them and the barbarous life of the rest of the world, in order to fit them for study and the cultivation of arts and science.  Accordingly, we find everywhere in the first institutions for the propagation of knowledge amongst any people, that those who followed it were set apart and secluded from the mass of the community.

[Sidenote:  A.D. 682]

The great ecclesiastical chair of this kingdom, for near a century, was filled by foreigners.  They were nominated by the Popes, who were in that age just or politic enough to appoint persons of a merit in some degree adequate to that important charge.  Through this series of foreign and learned prelates, continual accessions were made to the originally slender stock of English literature.  The greatest and most valuable of these accessions was made in the time and by the care of Theodorus, the seventh Archbishop of Canterbury.  He was a Greek by birth, a man of a high ambitious spirit, and of a mind more liberal and talents better cultivated than generally fell to the lot of the Western prelates.  He first introduced the study of his native language into this island.  He brought with him a number of valuable books in many faculties, and amongst them a magnificent copy of the works of Homer, the most ancient and best of poets, and the best chosen to inspire a people just initiated into letters with an ardent love and with a true taste for the sciences.  Under his influence a school was formed at Canterbury; and thus the other great fountain of knowledge, the Greek tongue, was opened in England in the year of our Lord 669.