Baring-Gould’s sources: Venerated by the Greeks on this day. Authority: — A life by his disciple Theophanes, afterwards enlarged by a certain John the Deacon, of unknown date. The following sketch is from the pen of Dr. Neale, in his " Hymns of the Eastern Church.”] A Sicilian by birth, Joseph of the Stadium left his native country on its occupation by the Mahometans in 830, and went to Thessalonica, where he embraced the monastic life. Thence he removed to Constantinople, but, in the second iconoclastic persecution, he seems to have felt no vocation for confessorship, and went to Rome. Taken by pirates, he was for some years a slave in Crete, where he converted many to the faith; and, having obtained his liberty, and returned to the imperial city, he stood high in the favour, first of S. Ignatius, and then of Photius, whom he accompanied into exile. On the death of that great man he was recalled, and gave himself up to hymnology. A legend, connected with his death, is sometimes represented on the walls of the churches in the Levant A citizen of Constantinople betook himself to the church of S. Theodore in the hopes of obtaining some benefit from the intercessions of that martyr. He waited three days in vain; then, just as he was about to leave the church in despair, S. Theodore appeared. “I,” said the vision, “and the other saints, whom the poet Joseph has celebrated in his canons, have been attending his soul to Paradise, hence my absence from my church.” Of the innumerable compositions of this most laborious writer it would be impossible to find one which, to Western taste, gives the least sanction to the position which he holds in the East The insufferable tediousness consequent on the necessity of filling eight odes into the praises of a saint, of whom nothing, beyond the fact of his existence, 6 *. Richard.