Conquest of Sicily by Charles of Aragon. It brought with it not only a new dynasty, but a new nobility; it did not expel or transplant the English nation, or any part of it, but it gradually deprived the leading men and families of England of their lands and offices and thrust them down into a secondary position under alien intruders. It did not at once sweep away the old laws and liberties of the land; but it at once changed the manner and spirit of their administration, and it opened the way for endless later changes in the laws themselves. It did not abolish the English language; but it brought in a new language by its side, which for a while supplanted it as the language of polite intercourse, and which did not yield to the surviving elder speech till it had affected it by the largest infusion that the vocabulary of one European tongue ever received from another. The most important of the formal changes in legislation, in language, in the system of government, were no immediate consequences of the Conquest, no mere innovations of the reign of William. They were the gradual developments of later times, when the Norman as well as the Englishman found himself under the yoke of a foreign master. But the reign of William paved the way for all the later changes which were to come, and the immediate changes which he himself wrought were, after all, great and weighty. They were none the less great and weighty because they affected the practical condition of the people far more than they affected its written laws and institutions. When a nation is driven to receive a foreigner as its King, when that foreign King divides the highest offices and the greatest estates of the land among his foreign followers, though such a change must be carefully distinguished from changes in the written law, still the change is, for the time, practically the greatest which a nation and its leaders can undergo.- The Norman Conquest, Introduction.

DEATH OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR.

The death-bed of William was a death-bed of all formal devotion, a death-bed of penitence which we

may trust was more than formal. The English Chronicler, William of Malmesbury, after weighing the good and evil in him, sends him out of the world with a charitable prayer for his soul's rest; and his repentance, late and fearful as it was, at once marks the distinction between the Conqueror on his bed of death and his successor cut off without a thought of penitence in the midst of his crimes. He made his will. The mammon of unrighteousness which he had gathered together amid the groans and tears of England he now strove so to dispose of as to pave his way to an everlasting habitation. All his treasures were distributed among the poor and the churches of his dominions. A special sum was set apart for the rebuilding of the churches which had been burned at Mantes, and gifts in money and books and ornaments of every kind were to be distributed among all the churches of England according to their rank. He then spoke of his own life and of the arrangements which he wished to make for his dominions after his death. The Normans, he said, were a brave and unconquered race; but they needed the curb of a strong and a righteous master to keep them in the path of order. Yet the rule over them must by all law pass to Robert. Robert was his eldest born; he had promised him the Norman succession before he won the crown of England, and he had received the homage of the barons of the Duchy. Normandy and Maine must therefore pass to Robert, and for them he must be the man of the French king. Yet he well knew how sad would be the fate of the land which had to be ruled by one so proud and foolish, and for whom a career of shame and sorrow was surely doomed.

But what was to be done with England? Now at last the heart of William smote him. To England he dared not appoint a successor; he could only leave the disposal of the island realm to the Almighty Ruler of the world. The evil deeds of his past life crowded upon his soul. Now at last his heart confessed that he had won England by no right, by no claim of birth; that he had won the English crown by wrong, and that what he had

won by wrong he had no right to give to another. He had won his realm by warfare and bloodshed; he had treated the sons of the English soil with needless harshness; he had cruelly wronged nobles and commons; he had spoiled many men wrongfully of their inheritance; he had slain countless multitudes by hunger or by the sword. The harrying of Northumberland now rose up before his eyes in all its blackness. The dying man now told how cruelly he had burned and plundered the land, what thousands of every age and sex among the noble nation which he had conquered had been done to death at his bidding. The sceptre of the realm which he had won by so many crimes he dared not hand over to any but to God alone. Yet he would not hide his wish that his son William, who had ever been dutiful to him, might reign in England after him. He would send him beyond the sea, and he would pray Lanfranc to place the crown upon his head, if the Primate in his wisdom deemed that such an act could be rightly done.

Of the two sons of whom he spoke, Robert was far away, a banished rebel; William was by his bedside. By his bedside also stood his youngest son, the English Ætheling, Henry the Clerk. "And what dost thou give to me, my father?" said the youth. "Five thousand pounds of silver from my hoard," was the Conqueror's answer. "But of what use is a hoard to me if I have no place to dwell in?" "Be patient, my son, and trust in the Lord, and let thine elders go before thee." It is perhaps by the light of later events that our chronicler goes on to make William tell his youngest son that the day would come when he would succeed both his brothers in their dominions, and would be richer and mightier than either of them. The king then dictated a letter to Lanfranc, setting forth his wishes with regard to the kingdom. He sealed it and gave it to his son William, and bade him, with his last blessing and his last kiss, to cross at once into England. William Rufus straightway set forth for Witsand, and there heard of his father's death. Meanwhile Henry, too, left his father's bedside to take for himself the money that was

left to him, to see that nothing was lacking in it's weight, to call together his comrades on whom he could trust, and to take measures for stowing the treasure in a place of safety. And now those who stood around the dying king began to implore his mercy for the captives whom. he held in prison. He granted the prayer. .

The last earthly acts of the Conqueror were now done. He had striven to make his peace with God and man, and to make such provision as he could for the children and the subjects whom he had left behind him. And now his last hour was come. On a Thursday morning in September, when the sun had already risen upon the earth, the sound of the great bell of the metropolitan minster struck on the ears of the dying king. He asked why it sounded. He was told that it rang for prime in the Church of our Lady. William lifted his eyes to heaven, he stretched forth his hands, and spake his last words: "To my Lady Mary, the Holy Mother of God, I commend myself, that, by her holy prayers, she may reconcile me to her dear Son, our Lord Jesus Christ." He prayed, and his soul passed away. William, king of the English and duke of the Normans, the man whose fame has filled the world in his own and in every following age, had gone the way of all flesh. No kingdom was left him now but his seven feet of ground, and even to that his claim was not to be undisputed.

The death of a king in those days came near to a break-up of all civil society. Till a new king was chosen and crowned, there was no longer a power in the land to protect or to chastise. All bonds were loosed: all public authority was in abeyance; each man had to look to his own as he best might. No sooner was the breath out of William's body than the great company which had patiently watched around him during the night was scattered hither and thither. The great men mounted their horses and rode with all speed to their homes, to guard their houses and goods against the outburst of lawlessness which was sure to break forth now that the land had no longer a ruler. Their servants and followers, seeing their lords gone, and deeming that there was

no longer any fear of punishment, began to make spoil of the royal chamber. Weapons, clothes, vessels, the royal bed and its furniture, were carried off, and for a whole day the body of the Conqueror lay well-nigh bare on the floor of the room in which he had died. The Norman Conquest.

THE STUDY OF GREEK AND LATIN.

The weak side of the old study of Greek and Latin lay in this, that they were studied apart from other languages. They were supposed to have some mysterious character about them, some supreme virtue peculiar to themselves, which made it needful to look at them all by themselves, and made it in a manner disrespectful to class any other languages with them. This belief, or rather feeling, grew naturally out of the circumstances of what is called the revival of learning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The learning then revived was an exclusively Greek and Latin learning, and it could hardly have been otherwise. And besides this, the error, like other errors, contains a certain measure of truth; it is a half-truth thrust out of its proper place. For purposes purely educational the Greek and Latin tongues have something which is peculiar to themselves, something which does set them apart from all others. That is, they are better suited than any other languages to be the groundwork of study.- Essay on Language and Lit

erature.

REEMAN, Mary Eleanor WILKINS, an American novelist; born at Randolph, Mass., in 1862. She was educated at Mount Holyoke Seminary. After residing some years at Brattleboro, Vt., she returned in 1883 to Randolph, which remained her home until her marriage to Charles Free