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C. 580-590 ] himself as a brother among the rest. For three years he lived in seclusion the religious life, according to the rule, there can be little doubt, of St Benedict, which he often afterwards so warmly eulogised. The chief of the Roman citizens had become a humble monk among monks: it was a contrast typical of the life, set betwixt civilisation and Christianity, barbarism and ascetic devotion, of the early Middle Age.

In the monastery of St Andrew the second part of Gregory's training was accomplished. For three years he was learning all that monasticism could teach him. And first it taught him a keen interest in the evangelisation of the heathen. It was probably at this date (though the evidence is uncertain), when he was one of the most famous personages in Rome, the chief civil ruler of the city who had given up all for the religious life, that his attention was first directed towards the distant isle of Britain. There is no reason to doubt the familiar story told so picturesquely by Bede, a narratio fidelium as the earlier Monk of Whitby calls it, that he was walking in the forum when he saw some Anglian lads, probably exposed for sale. He had heard of their coming and desired to see the denizens of a country concerning which Procopius had told the strange tale that thither Gaulish boatmen ferried the souls of the dead by night. Beautiful boys these were, with light complexion and light hair. "Alas," he said, when he was told they were heathens, "that lads so bright should be the slaves of darkness." He asked what was the name of their race. "Angli," they told him, and he answered that they had angel faces and should be coheirs of the angeli in heaven. They came from Deira: so should they be saved de ira Dei. Their king was Aelle: Alleluia should be sung in his land. From that moment Gregory planned to evangelise the English. He obtained the leave of the Pope, Benedict I; but the punning habit which seemed to have given him the first thought of his mission now intervened to check him in its course. He sat reading, during the rest time on the third day of his journey, and a locust settled on his book, and locusta seemed to mean loco sta: he should not proceed. So it proved, for messengers from the pope hurried to command his return, for the people of Rome would not suffer the departure of one whose services to them had been so recent and whose conspicuous self-abnegation seemed to shed a glory on the city of St Peter. The call of the Angles was set aside, but it was not forgotten. Gregory was given to learning, to asceticism, and to active assistance to the papal court.

The learning of his school-days was now continued on more exclusively ecclesiastical lines. In earlier years he had loved to read Augustine and Jerome. He became a deep student of the Bible. Later years, when he can have had little time for close study, shewed that he had become acquainted with the text of the Scriptures in detail more exact than was at all common in his day. What he read he pondered on, and he became a master of that "divine art" of Meditation which was to be so