Venerable Bede, surnamed the wise Saxon, is believ ed to have comprised, in the eight folio volumes of his works, in Latin, the whole body of knowledge which his age afforded.* Unlike the sententious Aldhelm, Bede is always plain and perspicuous, particularly in the his torical part, which contains the earliest of all accounts of the Anglo-Saxon monarchies. He was a priest in the monastery of Weremouth, in Northumberland, and died in 735.
Alcuin, the friend and preceptor of Charlemagne, was distinguished for his Latin prose, as well as poetry, some what later in the same century. He was born in North umberland, and studied under Egbcrt of York, already mentioned. His letters to Charlemagne breathe a dig nified affection for his imperial patron, unlike the ser vility which usually approaches kings. He was learned for the age, and wrote not inelegant verse ; but he added nothing to the stock of knowledge which he found, and, as a writer of prose, is of infinitely less consequence than Bede.
The invasions of a barbarous enemy, the reverses of a besotted clergy, and the extreme difficulty of procuring books, seem to have left the intervening period between these early scholars, and the reign of Alfred, to relapse into perfect ignorance. At last Alfred arose, at the end of the 9th century, and revived civilization. This best of men and monarchs, wisely preferring his native tongue to Latin, for disseminating knowledge, translated, among many works, the histories of Bede and Orosius.(*) Orosius was a Spaniard, and a Christian, who had writ ten a summary of ancient history down to the 5th cen tury, at which time he was himself alive, to refute an objection against Christianity, that it had filled the world with calamities, and to prove that the same miseries had been the lot of all ages. In parts of the work Al fred inserted pages from his own information. That original information was geographical, and related to countries as little known to Englishmen of those days, as the central regions of Africa to those of the present. It was not like the legends respecting distant countries, abounding in monsters and fables, which were gravely swallowed by the other scholars of the Anglo-Saxons of men fifteen feet high, with two faces, or with dog's heads ;t but a plain and credible account of two naviga tors, Ochter, a Norwegian, and Wulfstan, an Anglo-Sax on, whom Alfred had encouraged to explore the northern world, to discover the White Sea, and to visit the Finns and the Laplanders. How much ought we to venerate a monarch, who, in an age of such imperfect navigation, obtained the knowledge of those latitudes that were not again explored till 650 years after his death ! Captain Richard Chancellar was the first European, from the age of Alfred, who discovered the White Sea, and the river Dwina, in 1553.
In all the loth, and most of the 1 1 th centuries, Eng land seems to have produced only one man of learning ; for the hyperboles of the monks render the literary at tainments of Dunstan very questionable. This solitary light was Elfric of Dorsetshire, styled the grammarian, from his having written a grammar of the Latin tongue. Two volumes of his sermons, translated from Latin into Saxon, are alone known to be extant.
But while learning was thus declining, or almost dead, throughout Europe, the light of science had sprung up in the East among the Persians and Arabians. From them the illustrious Gerbert (afterwards Pope Sylvester the 2d.) a Frenchman, well meriting the name of a litera ry hero, had imported the science of Arabian Arithmetic. There is some room for supposing that the knowledge of ciphers had reached our countrymen within a few years from Gerbert's return. If the date over the ancient gateway of Worcester was really 975, we have direct evidence that this mode of notation was known in Eng land within five years from that event. Before the in troduction of Arabian figures, they followed the path of the ancients in their arithmetic, studying the metaphy sical distinction of.numbers ; they divided them into the useless arrangement of even numbers, equally equal, equally unequal, and unequally equal, while they classed the odd numbers into simple, composite, and mean. All this jargon was of as little consequence to the progress of numerical science as the distinctions of Aristotelian logic to the discovery of moral truth ; it only made ignorance more mysterious, and wasted ingenuity that might have been better employed. The little effect which might have been produced by such inadequate symbols, as Roman letters in this science, must have been even retarded by such laborious disquisitions. No wonder then that we find such men as Bede and Ald helm exclaiming, in agony, against the labour of so many years, which they expended on arithmetic, a science which our modern school-boys acquire the most import ant branches of in the space of a few weeks. So much does the progress of human knowledge, while it accu mulates truths, lighten the burden of acquiring them.