Monkey Poppy. _Papaver Orientale._
Dedicated to _St. Vincent_.
~May 25.~
_St. Mary Magdalen_ of Pazzi, A. D. 1607. _St. Urban_, Pope, A. D.
223. _St. Adhelm_, or _Aldhelm_. _St. Gregory_ VII., Pope, A. D. 1085.
_Sts. Maximus_, or _Mauxe_, and _Venerand_, Martyrs in Normandy, 6th
Cent. _St. Dumhade_, Abbot, A. D. 717.
_St. Aldhelm._
He founded the abbey of Malmesbury, and was the first Englishman who
cultivated Latin and English or Saxon poesy. Among his other
mortifications, he was accustomed to recite the psalter at night,
plunged up to the shoulders in a pond of water. He was the first bishop
of Sherborne, a see which was afterwards removed to Salisbury, and died
in 709.[148]
He turned a sunbeam into a clothes-peg; at least, so say his
biographers: this was at Rome. Saying mass there in the church of St.
John de Lateran, he put off his vestment; the servant neglecting to take
it, he hung it on a sunbeam, whereon it remained, “to the wonderful
admiration of the beholders.”[149]
* * * * *