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may be strongly impressed upon the minds of all who hear me ;-that they may see it-that they may feel it-that they may discourse of it to their children, and hold it up to the imitation of pos→ terity. If he could now be sensible to what passes here below, sure I am, that nothing could give him so much satisfaction as to find that we are endeavouring to make his memory and example, as he took care his life should be, useful to mankind.

I will conclude with applying to the present occasion a beautiful passage from the speech of a very young orator*. It may be thought, perhaps, to savour too much of the sanguine views of youth to stand the test of a rigid philosophical inquiry : but it is at least cheering and consolatory, and that in this instance it may be exemplified is, I am confident, the sincere wish of every man who hears me:" CRIME," says he, " is a curse only to the period in which it is successful; but VIRTUE, whether fortunate or otherwise, blesses not only its own age, but remotest posterity, and is as beneficial by its example as by its immediate effects." RT. HON. C. J. FOX.

THE VENERABLE BEDE.

THE great and justest boast of this monastery (Lindisfarm) is the venerable Beda, who was educated and spent his whole life there. account of his writings is an account of the Eng

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* Essay on the progressive Improvement of Mankind; an oration delivered in the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, December 17, 1798, by the Honourable William Lamb.

lish learning in that age, taken in its most advantageous view. Many of his works remain, and he wrote both in prose and verse, and upon all sorts of subjects. His theology forms the most considerable part of his writings. He wrote comments upon almost the whole Scripture, and several Homilies on the principal festivals of the church. Both the comments and sermons are generally allegorical in the construction of the text, and simply moral in the application. In these discourses several things seem strained and fanciful; but herein he followed entirely the manner of the earlier fathers, from whom the greatest part of his divinity is not so much imitated as extracted. The systematic and logical method, which seems to have been first introduced into theology by John of Damascus, and which was afterwards known by the name of school divinity, was not then in use, at least in the Western Church; though soon after it made an amazing progress. In this scheme the allegorical gave way to the literal explication; the imagination had less scope; and the affections were less touched. But it prevailed by an appearance more solid and philosophical; by an order more scientific; and by a readiness of application, either for the solution or the exciting of doubts and difficulties.

They also cultivated in this monastery the study of natural philosophy and astronomy. There remains of Beda one entire book, and some scattered essays on these subjects. This book, de Rerum Naturâ, is concise and methodical, and contains no very contemptible abstract of the

physics which were taught in the decline of the Roman empire. It was somewhat unfortunate that the infancy of English learning was supported by the dotage of the Roman, and that even the spring head whence they drew their instructions was itself corrupted. However, the works of the great masters of the ancient science still remained; but in natural philosophy the worst was the most fashionable. The Epicurean physics, the most approaching to rational, had long lost all credit, by being made the support of an impious theology and a loose morality. The fine visions of Plato fell into some discredit, by the abuse which heretics had made of them; and the writings of Aristotle seem to have been then the only ones much regarded, even in natural philosophy, in which branch of science alone they are unworthy of him. Beda entirely follows his system. The appearances of Nature are explained by matter and form, and by the four vulgar elements; acted upon by the four supposed qualities of hot, dry, moist, and cold. His astronomy is on the common system of the ancients; sufficient for the few purposes to which they applied it; but otherwise imperfect and grossly erroneous. He makes the moon larger than the earth; though a reflection on the nature of eclipses, which he understood, might have satisfied him of the contrary. But he had so much to copy that he had little time to examine. These speculations, however erroneous, were still useful; for though men err in assigning the causes of natural operations, the works of nature are by this means brought under their consideration; which cannot be done without

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enlarging the mind. The science may be false, or frivolous; the improvement will be real. may be here remarked, that soon afterwards the monks began to apply themselves to astronomy and chronology, from the disputes which were carried on with so much heat, and so little effect, concerning the proper time of celebrating Easter; and the English owed the cultivation of these noble sciences to one of the most trivial controversies of ecclesiastic discipline. Beda did not confine his attention to those superior sciences. He treated of music, of rhetoric, of grammar, and the art of versification, and of arithmetic, both by letters and on the fingers: and his work on this last subject is the only one in which that antique piece of curiosity has been preserved to us. All these are short pieces; some of them are in the catechetical method, and seemed designed for the immediate use of the pupils in his monastery, in order to furnish them with some leading ideas in the rudiments of these arts, then newly introduced into this country. He likewise made, and probably for the same purpose, a very ample and valuable collection of short philosophical, political, and moral maxims from Aristotle, Plato, Seneca, and other sages of heathen antiquity. He made a separate book of shining commonplaces and remarkable passages, extracted from the works of Cicero; of whom he was a great admirer, though he seems not to have been a happy or diligent imitator of his style. From a view of these pieces we may form an idea of what stock in the sciences the English at that time possessed; and what advances they had

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made. That work of Beda, which is the best known and most esteemed, is the Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation. Disgraced by a want of choice, and frequently by a confused ill disposition of his matter, and blemished with a degree of credulity next to infantine, it is still a valuable, and for the time a surprising, performance. The book opens with a description of this island, which would not have disgraced a classical author; and he has prefixed to it a chronological abridgment of sacred and profane history, connected from the beginning of the world; which, though not critically adapted to his main design, is of far more intrinsic value, and indeed displays a vast fund of historical erudition. On the whole, though this father of the English learning seems to have been but a genius of the middle class, neither elevated nor subtil, and one who wrote in a low style, simple, but not elegant, yet when we reflect upon the time in which he lived, the place in which he spent his whole life, within the walls of a monastery, in so remote and wild a country, it is impossible to refuse him the praise of an incredible industry, and a generous thirst of knowledge.

That a nation who, not fifty years before, had but just begun to emerge from a barbarism so perfect, that they were unfurnished even with an alphabet, should, in so short a time, have established so flourishing a seminary of learning, and have produced so eminent a teacher, is a circumstance which I imagine no other nation besides England can boast.

BURKE.

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