himself by Ina, King of Wessex, in 727. Thus the English have a national
association of their own with the central shrine of Christianity.

There was also a Schola Francorum in the Borgo. The pilgrims must have
built their huts and set up some sort of little oratory--favored, as
was the case even in Pope Nicholas' day, by the excellent quarry of
the Circus close at hand--as near as possible to the great shrine
and basilica which they had come so far to say their prayers in, and
attracted, too, no doubt, by the freedom of the lonely suburb between the
green hill and the flowing river. Leo IV built his wall round this little
city, and fortified it by towers. "In every part he put sculptors of
marble and wrote a prayer," says Platina. One of these gates led to St.
Pellegrino, another was close to the castle of St. Angelo, and was "the
gate by which one goes forth to the open country." The third led to the
School of the Saxons; and over each was a prayer inscribed. These three
prayers were all to the same effect--"that God would defend this new city
which the Pope had enclosed with walls and called by his own name, the
Leonine City, from all assaults of the enemy, either by fraud or by
force."

The greatest, however, of all the conceptions of Pope Nicholas, the very
centre of his great plan, was the library of the Vatican, which he began
to build and to which he left all the collections of his life. Vespasian
gives us a list of the principal among these five thousand volumes, the
things which he prized most, which the Pope bequeathed to the Church and
to Rome. These cherished rolls of parchment, many of them translations
made under his own eyes, were enclosed in elaborate bindings ornamented
with gold and silver. We are not, however, informed whether any of the
great treasures of the Vatican library came from his hands--the good
Vespasian taking more interest in the work of his scribes than in