is worthy of note, as having formed a collection of ecclesiastical canons, which, after remaining for ages among the MSS. in the Vatican library, was thought worthy of being published in an abridged form at Paris, in the year 1609, and afterwards at full length in 1661, by Voël and Justel, editors of the Bibliothêque du Droit Canon. Cardinal Baronius appears to have been the first person by whose notice this collection was rescued from oblivion, which is certainly a work of some curiosity to ecclesiastical historians.

IBRAHIM IMAM, the chief priest of the Mahometan religion, was a descendant of the illustrious house of Abbassides. His reputation and authority were so great, that Marvan or Hemar, the last caliph of the Ommiades, caused him to be put to death by thrusting his head into a bag of lime.

ST. CUTHBERT, was born in the north of England, and educated under the Scottish monks, in the famous abbey of Ilgii, since I'colm-Hill; celebrated for having been the seat of learning for British and Irish monks in that age. Egfred, king of Northumberland, invited Cuthbert to his court, where he converted and baptized many of the nobles. He was made bishop of the Northumbrian Saxons. But his love of solitude induced him to repair to Lindisferna, since called Holy Island, where he founded a monastery, the remains of which are yet to be seen. He died in 686, leaving behind him a great number of disciples.

AIDAN, bishop of Lindisfarne, or Holy Island, was originally a monk in the monastery of Iona or I'colmkill. In 634, he came to England at the request of Oswald, king of Northumberland, who employed him to instruct his subjects in the Christian religion. By his advice, the episcopal see was removed from York to Lindisfarne, where a beautiful monastery was erected, the ruins of which are still in being. Here Aidan laboured with great assiduity and success, till his death in 651. Some miracles are ascribed to him, and among others he is said to have calmed the sea in a storm, by pouring upon it consecrated oil. Yet the virtue of oil in such a case was mentioned by Pliny, in his Natural History, and Dr. Franklin has since confirmed it by experiments. Some time after, king Oswin had presented the bishop with a fine horse and rich housings, happening to meet with a poor man upon the road begging charity, Aidan dismounted, and presented the horse, thus caparisoned, to the beggar. The king was told of this eccentric act of humanity, and, when he next saw the bishop, expressed some displeasure at the slight which he conceived to have been put upon his favour. Aidan quaintly, but forcibly, replied, "Which do you value most, the son of a mare, or a son of God?" The reply made such an impression upon the king, that he afterwards intreated the bishop's forgiveness.

The following observations which Aidan made to a priest, who employed rigid means in attempting to convert the British people, are a strong proof of his good sense. "Your want of success, brother," said he, "seems to me to be owing to your want of condescension to the weakness of your unlearned hearers; whom, according to the apostolic rule, you should first have fed with the milk of a mild and less rigid doctrine, till, being nourished by degrees with the word of God, they were become capable of relishing the more perfect and sublime precepts of the Gospel."

PÂULÍNUS, an English bishop, who flourished in the early part of this century. He was the apostle of Yorkshire, and was the first archbishop of York. He built a church at Almonbury, and dedicated it to St. Alban, where he converted the Brigantes. Camden mentions a cross at Dewsborough, which had been erected to him, with this inscription, "Paulinus hic prædicavit et celebravit." York was so small at this time, that there was not so much as a small church in it, in which king Edwin could be baptized. Constantius made it a bishopric. Pope Honorius made it a metropolitan see. Paulinus baptized in the river Swale, in one day, ten thousand men, besides women and children, on the first conversion of the Saxons to Christianity, besides many at Halystone. At Walstone, in Northumberland, he baptized Sigebert, king of the East Saxons. Bede says, "Paulinus coming with the king and queen to the royal manor, called Ad-Gebim, (now Yeverm), staid there thirty-six days with them, employed in the duties of catechizing, instructing, and baptizing the people in the neighbouring river Glen." He adds, that "he preached the word in the province of Lindiffi, and converted the governor of the city of Lindocollina, whose name was Blecca, with all his family. In this city he built a stone church of exquisite workmanship, whose roof being ruined, only the walls are now standing." He also founded a collegiate church of prebends, near Southwell, in Nottinghamshire, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, when he baptized the Poictani in the Trent.

ST. ČEADDA, or CHAD, was educated in the monastery of Lindisfarne, under St. Aidan. To improve himself in sacred literature he went into Ireland, and spent some time with St. Egbert, till recalled by his brother, St. Cedd, to assist him in arranging the concerns of the monastery of Lestingay, which he had founded in the mountains of the Deiri, or Woulds of Yorkshire. St. Cedd being made bishop of London, or of the east Saxons, left to him the entire government of this house. Oswi having yielded up Bernicia, or the northern part of his kingdom, to his son Alefrid, this prince sent St. Wilfrid into France, that he might be consecrated to the bishopric of the Northumbrian kingdom, or of York; but he staid so long

abroad, that Oswi himself nominated St. Chad to that dignity, who was ordained by Wini, bishop of Winchester, assisted by two British prelates, in 666. Bede assures us, that he zealously devoted himself to all the laborious functions of his charge, visiting his diocese on foot, preaching the gospel, and seeking out the poorest and most abandoned persons to instruct and comfort, in the meanest cottages and in the fields, Our saint afterwards left the see of York, and retired to the monastery of Lestingay, but was not suffered to bury himself long in that solitude. Jarman, bishop of the Mercians, dying, St. Chad was called upon to take upon him the charge of that most important diocese. He was the fifth bishop of the Mercians, and first fixed that see at Lichfield, so called from a great number of martyrs slain and buried there under Maximianus Herculeus; the name signifying the Field of Carcases. Hence this city bears for its arms, a landscape covered with bodies of martyrs. St. Theodorus considering St. Chad's old age, and the great extent of his diocese, absolutely forbad him to make his visitations on foot, as he used to do at York. St. Chad remained in the diocese of Lichfield for two years and a half, dying in the great pestilence in 673.

BISCOP, or EPISCOPUS BENEDICT, an English abbot, was born of a noble family among the English Saxons, and in the twenty-fifth year of his age devoted himself wholly to religion. Accordingly, in 653, he took a journey, in order to acquaint himself with the ecclesiastical discipline, and on his return he laboured to establish it in Britain. Upon his return from a second journey to Rome, in the course of which he received the tonsure, he assumed the government of the monastery of Canterbury, to which he had been elected during his absence. After a third journey to Rome, whence he brought back a large collection of valuable books, he resorted to the court of Egfrid, king of Northumberland, who had succeeded Oswy. On a tract of land, given to him by that prince, he erected a monastery, which, from its situation upon the river Were, was called " Weremouth;" in which he is said to have placed three hundred Benedictine monks. The church of this convent was built of stone, by artificers fetched from France, in 674, and both the church and convent were dedicated to St. Peter. From a fourth excursion to Rome, in 678, he returned laden with books, relics of the apostles and martyrs, images and pictures. In 682, he built another monastery on the banks of the Tyne, four miles from Newcastle, called Gurvy," or "Jarron," and dedicated to St. Paul. Soon after this establishment he took a fifth journey to Rome, and came back enriched with a further supply of ecclesiastical ornaments. Soon after his return he was seized with a palsy; and at length closed his life in a truly Christian and exemplary

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manner in the year 690, and was buried in his monastery of Weremouth. He wrote some works on monastic discipline, and the church ritual. He was a celebrated singer, and in one of his expeditions to Rome, brought with him a chauntor, who introduced the Roman method of singing mass.

ADAMANUS, or ADAMNANUS, abbot of the monastery of Iona, or I'colmkill, was born in 624. He was a man of considerable learning, and of a peaceable disposition; yet he enforced the discipline of the church with great rigour, and participated in the credulity of the age. He died Oct. 23, 704, in the eightieth year of his age. From the information of a French ecclesiastic, who had been in Palestine, he wrote "De Locis Terræ Sanctæ," which has been published by Serrarius and Mabillon. He was also the author of a Life of St. Columba, which Surius has published.

ST. ETHELDREDA, was a princess of distinguished piety, daughter of Auna, king of the East Angles, and Hereswitha his queen, and was born about the year 630, at Ixming, a small village in Suffolk. In the year 673, she founded the conventual church of Ely, with the adjoining convent. Of this monastery she was constituted abbess, the monks and nuns living in society and regular order; and the monastery flourished for nearly two hundred years, but was destroyed, with its inhabitants, by the Danes, in 870.

ST. ALDHELM, bishop of Sherborn in the time of the Saxon Heptarchy. He is said to have been the son of Kenred, brother to Ina, king of the West Saxons. Having received the first part of his education, under one Macduff, a learned Scot, he travelled into France and Italy for his improvement. At his return, he studied under Adrian, abbot of St. Augustin's in Canterbury, the most learned professor of science who had then been in England. In these different seminaries he acquired a very uncommon stock of knowledge; for which he became famous both at home and abroad; whence several learned men sent him their writings for correction; particularly Prince Arcivil, a son of the Prince of Scotland, who wrote many pieces which he sent to Aldhelm, "intreating him to give them the last polish, by rubbing off the Scots rust." He was the first Englishman who wrote in Latin, and he composed a book for the instruction of his countrymen, in the prosody of that language. Bede says, "He was a man of universal erudition, and well acquainted with both philosophical and religious subjects." In fact, considering the cloud of ignorance by which he was surrounded, and the great difficulty of acquiring knowledge, Aldhelm was a very extraordinary man. From one of his letters to Hedda, bishop of Winchester, he appears to have been determined to acquire every species of learning in his power. King Alfred the Great declared, that

Aldhelm was the best of the Saxon poets; and that a favourite song, which was universally sung in his time, near 200 years after its author's death, was of his composition. When he was abbot of Malmsbury, having a fine voice, and great skill in music as well as poetry, and observing the backwardness of his barbarous countrymen to listen to grave instructions, he composed a number of little poems, which he sung to them after mass; by which they were gradually instructed and civilized. After this excellent person had governed the monastery of Malmsbury, of which he was the founder, about thirty years, he was made bishop of Sherborn, where he died A. D. 709.

WILLEBROD, the apostle of Friseland, was an AngloSaxon, and born in Northumberland about the year 658, and educated in the abbey of Rippon, where he engaged in the religious profession. At the age of thirty-three, he accompanied eleven of his countrymen into Batavia, and employed himself for three or four years in converting the Frisians who were under the French dominion; and having met with great success, he went to Rome, and received from pope Sergius the pallium, and was ordained archbishop of Friseland. Pepin gave him a residence at Wilteburg, now Utrecht, of which he was the first prelate. Embarking from Friseland for the north, he penetrated into Denmark, and on his return was cast by a storm on an island called Fasteland, supposed to be the same with Heligoland. He afterwards baptized Pepin, son of Charles Martel, and spent the rest of his life in propagating Christianity among the Batavians. His colleague and assistant was Wilfrid his countryman, surnamed Boniface, the apostle of Germany. He died in 740, at the age of eighty-two; was buried at his abbey of Poternac, in the Diocese of Treves, and honoured with canonization. His life was written by the celebrated Alcuin.

St. BONIFACE, an Englishman, called the apostle of Germany, was born at Crediton, in Devonshire, about the year 280, his real name being Wilfrid. He was educated at Exeter, and on entering into orders became a famous preacher, and a zealous missionary. He went over to Friseland in 715, attended by two companions in order to preach the gospel among the heathens. A war between Kadbod king of the country, and Charles Martel, however, drove him back to England; but, still animated with the same zeal for converting the pagans, he went to Rome, and received a commission from pope Gregory II. in 719. He then proceeded into Bavaria and Thuringia, where he laboured with great success, and on his return to Rome was consecrated bishop of Germany, after which he resumed his mission, and in 732 received the title of archbishop, under the authority of which he founded several new churches, fixing his own residence at Mentz. In 746 he laid the founda