[2] "The Six Days of the Creation" offered a subject for an heroic poem to Dracontius, a Spanish monk, in the fifth century, and who was censured for neglecting to honour the seventh by a description of the Sabbath of the Divine repose. It is preserved in "Bib. Patrum," vol. viii., and has been published with notes. Genesis and Exodus--the fall of Adam--the Deluge--and the passage of the Red Sea, were themes which invited the sacred effusions of Avitus, the Archbishop of Vienne, who flourished in the sixth century. His writings were collected by Père Sirmond. This Archbishop attacked the Arians, but we have only fragments of these polemical pamphlets; as these were highly orthodox, what is wanting occasioned regrets in a former day. Other histories in Latin verse drawn from the Old Testament are recorded.
[3] Among our ancestors all proper names were significant; and when they are not, we have the strongest presumptive reasons for suspecting that the name has been borrowed from some other tongue. The piety of many monks in their pilgrimages in the Holy Land would induce them to acquire some knowledge of the Hebrew or even the Chaldee--Bede read Hebrew. A scholar who has justly observed this, somewhat cabalistically has discovered that "the initial word of Genesis in Chaldee," and printed in Hebraic characters [Hebrew: behadsin], exhibits the presumed name of the Saxon monk.
[4] This sort of cento seems to have been a favourite fancy with this masterly versifier; for of another Anglo-Saxon bard who composed on warlike subjects, this critic says--"If the names of Patroclus and Menelaus were substituted for Byrthnoth and Godric, some of the scenes might be almost literally translated into a cento of lines from Homer." Homer's claim to originality, however, is secure from any critical collation with the old Saxon monk.
[5] Notwithstanding the information with which I was favoured, I cannot divest myself of the notion that "the rebellion of the angels" must be more explicitly described among the Jewish traditions than yet appears; because we find allusions to it in two of the apostolical writings. In the epistle of Jude, ver. 6: "_The angels which kept not their first estate_, but left their own habitation, He hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day." And in Peter, ii. 4: "_God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to Hell_, and delivered them unto chains of darkness to be reserved unto judgment." These texts have admitted of some dispute; but it seems, however, probable that the apostles, just released from their Jewish bondage, had not emancipated themselves from the received Hebraical doctrines.