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Covered with the ruins of an ancient Roman city, and swarming with serpents, it was colonized again, in A.D. 410, by a young man of rank named Honoratus, who gathered round him a crowd of disciples, converted the desert isle into a garden of flowers and herbs, and made the sea-girt sanctuary of Lerins one of the most important spots of the then world.
But Antonius Honoratus, who was first among the tribunes, summoning together in the evening those under his command, charged himself and them severely with their many and unreasonable turns and alterations, made without any purpose or regard to merit, simply as if some evil genius hurried them from one treason to another.
Paulinus, the patriarch of Aquileia, removed his treasures, sacred and profane, to the Isle of Grado, and his successors were adopted by the infant republic of Venice, which was continually enriched by the public calamities. Honoratus, who filled the chair of St.
Honoratus luckily for him escaped the investigation of the Senate by dying; Martianus was brought before them when Priscus was not present.
A cynic who emphasized his principles by wearing a bear's skin he insisted on addressing not by his name of Honoratus, but as Bruin. Asked for a definition of Happiness, he said that only the free was happy.
The face of the isle was changed, the desert became a garden. Honoratus, whose fine face is described to us as radiant with a sweet and attractive majesty, opened here an asylum and a school for all such as loved Christ."
He had beside him his fellow-countryman, Alypius, the future Bishop of Thagaste, who had followed him to Carthage and would, later on, follow him to Milan; Nebridius, a not less dear companion, fated to die early; Honoratus, whom he drew into his errors and later did his best to enlighten; and, finally, that mysterious young man, whose name he does not tell us, and whose loss he mourned as never any one has mourned the death of a friend.
In a side chapel of the old church of S. Honoratus is a sarcophagus that contains the skull and bones and dust of a young girl. The coffin is of lead, and this perhaps accounts for the preservation. Along with it were found the gold ear-rings and other trinkets. On the ear-rings a cross, but the inscription on the tomb hardly leads one to believe the girl was a Christian.
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