1041; he was a great patron of monastic institutions, and collected together a body of all the most useful laws, which had been made by the Saxon and Danish kings, which ever after

wards went by his name; and was regarded as the patron saint of England, till superseded by S. George in the thirteenth century. The title of Confessor was given him by the Pope, and many miracles were attributed to his relics, which were translated on this day with great pomp into the

new shrine made for them by S. EDWARD CONFESSOR'

King Henry III., a curious illu

mination of which ceremony is

from a painting on the rood-screen, S, Swithun's Church, Norwich.

given by Shaw. He is said among other things to have cured a poor woman of a glandular swelling in the throat by touching it, and hence arose the custom of touching for the king's evil. Many miracles are recorded of him by William of Malmesbury, but the legend by which he is best known is, that as he was returning from Church, a poor man solicited alms of him, and he gave him the ring off his finger; some years after this, two pilgrims returning from the Holy Land, met another pilgrim, who gave them a ring and told them to take it to King Edward, with the message that it was the one he had bestowed

upon a beggar in Westminster some years since, and that he should, soon after receiving it, depart this life and remain with him for ever, he then acknowledged himself as S. John the Evangelist, and vanished. S. Edward received and acknowledged the ring, and shortly afterwards fell sick on Christmas Eve, and died on the following eve of the Epiphany. He is represented crowned, holding a sceptre, and the ring which he gave to S. John the Evangelist in the disguise of a poor man, sometimes with the Gospel of S. John in one hand. In England there are twenty-one Churches dedicated in this name, but one at Cambridge is the only one we can identify as named in honour of the Confessor, some of the others are most probably in honour of S. Edward the King.

OCTOBER 17. S. Etheldreda, (or Audry,) Queen and Virgin, A.D. 670. A princess of distinguished piety, and one of the most celebrated of English virgin saints, daughter of Anna, king of the East Angles; she early made a vow of virginity, which was respected by both her husbands, the second of whom was Egfrid, king of Northumbria, and who after some reluctance consented to her taking the veil, but afterwards repenting of his permission he advanced towards Coldingham priory, where she had retired, and to escape him she fled southward to the Isle of Ely, where she founded the conventual Church of Ely, with the adjoining convent, and of this monastery she was constituted Abbess: during her flight the legend says

she lay down to rest and planted her staff in the earth

at her head, when she awoke she found it had grown into a shady tree and had screened her while asleep from the rays of the sun. Traces of this legend are frequently met with in painted glass, especially in Churches in East Anglia. She is represented sleeping, with a young tree blossoming over her head. Sometimes in the dress of an abbess with a crosier, and crowned, and the insignia of royalty in the back ground. Six Churches, all in different counties, are still named after her, one in Cambridgeshire, Histon, is destroyed, and Ely Cathedral is dedicated to her conjointly with S. Peter.

8. ETHELDREDA, from Porter's Lives of the Saints,

OCTOBER 18. S. Luke,
Evangelist, A.D. 63. Of

the personal history of S.

Luke we know but little, he was not one of the Apostles, and was probably not converted till after the Ascension. He was the companion

Emblem of 8 Luke

and beloved friend of S. Paul, after whose death he