The legend relates that Gregory saw on the top of Hadrian's tomb an angel with a drawn sword, which he sheathed as the plague abated.
(1) H.O.

Taylor: The Mediaeval Mind, 2 vols., Macmillan Co., New York, 1911.

(New edition, 1920.) (2) Ibid., Vol.

1, p.

13: "Under their action (the Christian Fathers) the peoples of Western Europe, from the eighth to the thirteenth century, passed through a homogeneous growth, and evolved a spirit different from that of any other period of history--a spirit which stood in awe before its monitors divine and human, and deemed that knowledge was to be drawn from the storehouse of the past; which seemed to rely on everything except its sin-crushed self, and trusted everything except its senses; which in the actual looked for the ideal, in the concrete saw the symbol, in the earthly Church beheld the heavenly, and in fleshly joys discerned the devil's lures; which lived in the unreconciled opposition between the lust and vain-glory of earth and the attainment of salvation; which felt life's terror and its pitifulness, and its eternal hope; around which waved concrete infinitudes, and over which flamed the terror of darkness and the Judgment Day." Galen died about 200 A.D.; the high-water mark of the Renaissance, so far as medicine is concerned, was reached in the year 1542.