considered as the most significant of phenomena. They seemed a guarantee that the relations were right between the supernatural powers on the one hand and on the other the men who possessed the "sanctity" to work miracles and those who had the faith or merit to be cured or rescued by them. Gregory's eight books of Miracles were thus a register of the chief interest of his day, with an eye of course to its promotion, and it is much more remarkable that he wrote a History of the Franks than that he compiled this usually wearisome array of impossibilities.
A brief glance at the practical situation that lay back of the four books which Gregory devotes to the miracles wrought by St. Martin will be enlightening. The cult of St. Martin was a great organized enterprise at the head of which Gregory was placed. In the sixth century St. Martin's tomb was a center toward which the crippled, the sick, and those possessed by demons flowed as if by gravity from a large territory around Tours. The cures wrought there did much "to strengthen the faith." They passed from mouth to mouth and brought greater numbers to the shrine and it was to aid this process that the four books of St. Martin's miracles were written. Gregory is here a promoter and advertiser. To get at the practical side of the situation we have only to remember that St. Martin's tomb was the chief place of healing among the shrines of Gaul, and that the shrines of the sixth century stood for the physicians, hospitals, drugs, patent medicines, and other healing enterprises of the twentieth.
The History of the Franks is Gregory's chief work. It was written in three parts. The first, comprising books I-IV, begins with the creation, and after a brief outline of events enters into more detail with the introduction of Christianity into Gaul. Then follow the appearance of the Franks on the scene of history, their conversion, the conquest of Gaul under Clovis, and the detailed history of the Prankish kings down to the death of Sigibert in 575. At this date Gregory had been bishop of Tours two years. The second part comprises books V and VI and closes with Chilperic's death in 584. During these years Chilperic held Tours and the relations between him and Gregory were as a rule unfriendly. The most eloquent passage in the History of the Franks is the closing chapter of book VI, in which Chilperic's character is unsympatheti-
