The traveller who looks at the few and slight fragments of monastic architecture yet to be seen at Canterbury, has before him—as is well known, nowadays, to almost every traveller—the little that is left of the earliest seat of Christianity in England, about which our information is distinctly historical, and plainly separable from mere tradition. Such travellers, too, as care about the history of collections of books, will have some pleasure in the thought that they are also looking upon the site of England's first known Library.

That infant and tiny collection of the Holy Scriptures and of two or three books of Theology, came from St. Gregory, and with St. Augustine. Towards the close of the seventh century, Theodore of Tarsus, it is recorded, added a large number of books to the small foundation of Augustine.