Page:Historical Works of Venerable Bede vol. 2.djvu/15



reader is here presented for the first time with an English version of the Minor Historical Productions of the Venerable Bede. In his larger and more important work, “The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation,” the Author has taken a general view of English History during his own time. In the minor pieces, contained in the present volume, he has contracted his range to a narrower compass, introducing us, as it were, within the walls of those most interesting societies, the Monasteries of the Saxon period. In the “Lives of St. Cuthbert, and of the Abbots of Weremouth and Jarrow,” the simplicity of the narrative, the almost daily account of the occupations of the Monks, and the minute details of the introduction of many of the useful arts into England, form altogether an attraction, which we shall seek for in vain in any other writer, who has left us any memorials of the ways of life, which existed among our Anglo-Saxon progenitors.