THE ADVENT OF BEDE.--The greatest literary character of the Anglo-Saxon
period, and the one who is of most value in teaching us the history of the
times, both directly and indirectly, is the man who has been honored by
his age as the _venerable Bede_ or _Beda_. He was born at Yarrow, in the
year 673; and died, after a retired but active, pious, and useful life, in
735. He wrote an Ecclesiastical history of the English, and dedicated it
to the most glorious King Ceowulph of Northumberland, one of the monarchs
of the Saxon Heptarchy. It is in matter and spirit a Saxon work in a Latin
dress; and, although his work was written in Latin, he is placed among the
Anglo-Saxon authors because it is as an Englishman that he appears to us
in his subject, in the honest pride of race and country which he
constantly manifests, and in the historical information which he has
conveyed to us concerning the Saxons in England: of a part of the history
which he relates he was an _eye-witness_; and besides, his work soon
called forth several translations into Anglo-Saxon, among which that of
Alfred the Great is the most noted, and would be taken for an original
Saxon production.

It is worthy of remark, that after the decline of the Saxon literature,
Bede remained for centuries, both in the original Latin and in the Saxon
translations, a sealed and buried book; but in the later days, students of
English literature and history began to look back with eager pleasure to
that formative period prior to the Norman conquest, when English polity
and institutions were simple and few, and when their Saxon progenitors
were masters in the land.