qualities, and the same central impulse? With no strained interpretation, we may well consider him the first complete Englishman; for in him three centuries before the Conquest, six centuries before Chaucer, the gifts of the races have met and blended. He was "brought from his earliest years under the influences alike of Iona and Rome and Gaul and Canterbury"; and the union of all these influences may well be the explanation of the surprising modernness with which, as we said at the beginning, his personality and work impress us. Heir of the scholarship of Theodore and Hadrian, he dearly loved the fine art of Christian living, and a quiet zest for knowledge imparts to his peaceful pages a fine excitement. He adheres, moreover, to the Roman party, and contemplates with enthusiasm the orderly development of the Church. Yet deeply though he respected the powers so necessary to the continuity of Christendom, his heart was with the Celts; how otherwise should his treatment of them be marked with that tender grace and lingering affection which place these portions of his work among the dearest classics in Christian letters? Beneath Celtic instinct and Latin training, however (base and source of all his being), is the sturdy Anglo-Saxon moral nature, marked by sanity, moderation, depth and self-control. "Bede," says ten Brink, "embodies the energetic working power, the positive historic sense, the love of simplicity and truth, that perhaps form the determining elements in the nobler side of English nationality." His serious and reflective temper is unmistakably English—the temper of a Colet, a Johnson, a Cowper, a Tennyson. And as he stands before us a characteristic Englishman, whose strength is modified, enriched, but never overcome by elements brought from without, so we see in him a singularly complete Christian. He effaces himself in his story, yet the ages rejoice to recognize in him a high example of that Christian manliness in which the ruling instincts are poverty of spirit, sympathy, meekness, mercifulness, aspiration for justice and firm desire to serve the cause of peace. Nor, finally, are we permitted to doubt that even during the earthly life of this
