There follows an age which interrupts this hive-like labour with sudden and insensate destruction.  German tribes from the north, Turkish from the east, break in upon the granaries and send up literature in flames; the Christian Fathers from Tertullian to Gregory the Great (I regret to say) either heartily assisting or at least warming their benedictory hands at the blaze:  and so thoroughly they do their work that even the writings of Aristotle, the Philosopher, must wait for centuries as ’things silently gone out of mind or things violently destroyed’ (to borrow Wordsworth’s fine phrase) and creep back into Europe bit by bit, under cover of Arabic translations.

The scholars set to work and begin rebuilding:  patient, indefatigable, anonymous as the coral insects at work on a Pacific atoll-building, building, until on the near side of the gulf we call the Dark Age, islets of scholarship lift themselves above the waters:  mere specks at first, but ridges appear and connect them:  and, to first seeming, sterile enough: 

  Nec Cereri opportuna seges, nec commoda Baccho—­

but as they join and become a terra firma, a thin soil gathers on them God knows whence:  and, God knows whence, the seed is brought, ‘it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain.’  There is a price, again, for this resurrection:  but how nobly, how blithely paid you may learn, without seeking recondite examples, from Cuthbert’s famous letter describing the death of Bede.  Compare that story with that of the last conversation of Socrates; and you will surely recognise that the two men are brothers born out of time; that Bede’s work has been a legacy; that his life has been given to recreating—­not scholarship merely nor literature merely—­but, through them both, something above them both—­the soul of Europe.  And this may or may not lead you on to reflect that beyond our present passions, and beyond this War, in a common sanity Europe (and America with her) will have to discover that common soul again.

But eminent spirits such as Bede’s are, by their very eminence, less representative of the process—­essentially fugitive and self-abnegatory—­than the thousands of copyists who have left no name behind them.  Let me read you a short paragraph from “The Cambridge History of English Literature,” Chapter 11, written, the other day, by one of our own teachers: 

The cloister was the centre of life in the monastery, and in the cloister was the workshop of the patient scribe.  It is hard to realise that the fair and seemly handwriting of these manuscripts was executed by fingers which, on winter days, when the wind howled through the cloisters, must have been numbed by icy cold.  It is true that, occasionally, little carrels or studies in the recesses of the windows were screened off from the main walk of the cloister, and, sometimes, a small room or cell would be partitioned off for the use of a single scribe.