and on their return the Ethelwolf relieves the tedium of travel by marrying the twelve-year old daughter of Charles the Bald of France. Those were times of extraordinary daring.

The great king had throughout a most picturesque and adventurous life: he is hard pushed by the Danes-by rivals-by his own family; one while a wanderer on the moors - another time disguised as minstrel in the enemy's camp; but always highhearted, always hopeful, always working. He is oppressed by the pall of ignorance that lays over that lordly reach of his kingdom: "Scarce a priest have I found," says he, "south of the Thames who can render Latin into English." He is not an apt scholar himself, but he toils at learning; his abbots help him; he revises old chronicles, and makes people to know of Beda; he has boys taught to write in English; gives himself with love to the rendering of Boëthius' "Consolation of Philosophy." He adopts its reasoning, and plants his hope on the creed

1st. That a wise God governs.

2d. That all suffering may be made helpful. 3d. That God is chiefest good.

4th. That only the good are happy.

5th. That the foreknowledge of God does not con flict with Free-will.

These would seem to carry even now the pith and germ of the broadest theologic teachings.

It is a noble and a picturesque figure that of King Alfred - which we see, looking back over the vista of a thousand years; better it would seem than that of King Arthur to weave tales around, and illumine with the heat and the flame of poesy. Yet poets of those times and of all succeeding times have strangely neglected this august and royal type of manhood.

After him came again weary Danish wars and wild blood-letting and ignorance surging over the land, save where a little light played fitfully around such great religious houses as those of York and Canterbury. It was the dreary Tenth Century, on the threshold of which he had died the very core

and kernel of the Dark Ages, when the wisest thought the end of things was drawing nigh, and strong men quaked with dread at sight of an eclipse, or comet, or at sound of the rumble of an earthquake. It was a time and a condition of

gloom which made people pardon, and even relish such a dismal poem as that of "The Grave," which - though bearing thirteenth century form- may well in its germ have been a fungal outgrowth of the wide-spread hopelessness of this epoch:

For thee was a house built
Ere thou wert born;

For thee was a mold meant

Ere thou of mother cam'st.

But it is not made ready
Nor its depth measured,

Nor is it seen

How long it shall be.

Now I bring thee

Where thou shalt be

And I shall measure thee

And the mold afterward.

Doorless is that house

And dark is it within;

There thou art fast detained

And death hath the key

Loathsome is that earth-house

And grim within to dwell,

And worms shall divide thee.

From the death of Alfred (901) to the Norman Conquest (1066) there was monkish work done in shape of Homilies, Chronicles, grammars of Latin

and English the language settling more and more

into something like a determined form of what is now called Anglo-Saxon. But in that lapse of years I note only three historic incidents, which by reason of the traditions thrown about them, carry a piquant literary flavor.

Canute and Godiva.

The first is when the famous Canute, king of both England and Denmark, and having strong taste for song and music and letters, rows by the towers of a great East-England religious house, and as he drifts with the tide, composes (if we may trust tradition) a snatch of verse which has come down to us in a thirteenth century form, about the pleasant singing of the Monks of Ely. Wordsworth has embalmed the matter in one of his Ecclesiastic Sonnets (xxx.):

A pleasant music floats along the mere,
From monks in Ely chanting service high,
While as Canute the king is rowing by ;
My oarsman quoth the mighty king, draw near
That we the sweet songs of the monks may hear.
He listens (all past conquests and all schemes

Of future vanishing like empty dreams)
Heart-touched, and haply not without a tear,
The royal minstrel, ere the Choir is still,
While his free barge skims the smooth flood along
Gives to the rapture an accordant Rhyme

O suffering Earth! be thankful; sternest Clime
And rudest Age are subject to the thrill

Of heaven-descended piety and song.

I think you will never go under the wondrous arches of Ely Cathedral - and you should go there if you ever travel into the eastern counties of England-without thinking of King Canute and of that wondrous singing of the monks, eight hundred years ago.

The second historic incident of which I spoke, is the murder of King Duncan by Macbeth in the year 1039, some twenty-five years before the Norman Conquest. I don't think you want any refreshing about Macbeth.

The third incident is of humbler tone, yet it went to show great womanly devotion, and lifted a tax from the heads of a whole towns-people. I refer to the tradition of Earl Leofric of Mercia and the Lady Godiva of Coventry, based in the main, without doubt, upon actual occurrence, and the subject for