But the chief and pattern of all the recluses of Nitria was the great St. Macarius of Alexandria, whose feast-day--a day which he never observed himself--is still kept by the Latins on the 2nd, and by the Greeks on the 19th of January. This famous saint died A.D. 394, after sixty years of austerities in various deserts: he first retired into the Thebaid in the year 335, and about the year 373 established himself in a solitary cell on the borders of the Natron lakes. Numerous anchorites followed his example, all living separately, but meeting together on Sundays for public prayer. Self-denial and abstinence were their great occupations; and it is related that a traveller having given St. Macarius a bunch of grapes, he sent it to another brother, who sent it to a third, and at last, the grapes having passed through the hands of some hundreds of hermits, came back to St. Macarius, who rejoiced at such a proof of the abstinence of his brethren, but refused to eat of it himself. This same saint having thoughtlessly killed a gnat which was biting him, he was so unhappy at what he had done, that to make amends for his inadvertency, and to increase his mortifications, he retired to the marshes of Scete, where there were flies whose powerful stings were sufficient to pierce the hide of a wild boar; here he remained six months, till his body was so much disfigured that his brethren on his return only knew him by the sound of his voice. He was the founder of the monastic order which, as well as the monastery still existing on the site of his cell, was called after his name. By their rigid rule the monks are bound to fast the whole year, excepting on Sundays and during the period between Easter and Whitsuntide: they were not to speak to a stranger without leave. During Lent St. Macarius fasted all day, and sometimes ate nothing for two or three days together; on Sundays, however, he indulged in a raw cabbage-leaf, and in short set such an example of abstinence and self-restraint to the numerous anchorites of the desert, that the fame of his austerities gained him many admirers. Throughout the middle ages his name is mentioned with veneration in all the collections of the lives of the saints: he is represented pointing out the vanities of life in the great fresco of the Triumph of Death, by Andrea Orcagna, in the Campo Santo at Pisa. In his Life in Caxton's 'Golden Legende,' and in 'The Lives of the Fathers,' by Wynkyn de Worde, a detailed account will be found of a most interesting conversation which Macarius had with the devil, touching divers matters. Several of his miracles are also put into modern English, in Lord Lindsay's book of Christian Art. I have a MS. of the Gospels in Coptic, written by the hand of one Zapita Leporos, under the rule of the great Macarius, in the monastery of Laura, about the year 390, and which may have been used by the Saint himself.