Excerpt from English Literature, 596-1832

Glimpses of a busy life, social and monastic, in the west of England, no detailed picture of which it is now possible to reconstruct. The most distin guished known writer was St. Aldhelm, a monk of Malmesbury, and, for a few years before his death in 709, bishop of Sherborne. His extant works in Latin are chie¿y in praise of virginity, that form of self-mastery which, difficult as it was for a people teeming with undeveloped power and unexhausted passion, included, he might think, and made possible every other kind of self-mas tery. The Saxon writings of St. Aldhelm are lost, unless we accept a conjecture of Grimm that he was the author of Andreas, one of the poems in the Verc Codex. Cynewulf, the author of Crist, Elene, and Juliana, though to us.

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