tury 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 townspeople. 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 centuries of annual commemoration.1 Tennyson tells, in his always witching way, how

It is of record in MATTHEW OF WESTMINSTER, a Benedictine monk of the fourteenth century-Flores Historiarum-first printed in 1567. “Nuda equum ascendens, crines capitis et tricas dissolvens, corpus suum

She rode forth clothed on with chastity:

The deep air listened round her as she rode,
-the barking cur
Made her cheek flame; her palfry's foot-fall shot
Light horror thro' her pulses:

One low churl compact of thankless earth
Peep'd-but his eyes, before they had their will
Were shrivelled into darkness in his head,

And she, that knew not, pass'd; and all at once With twelve great shocks of sound, the shameless

noon

Was clash'd and hammered from a hundred

towers,

One after one: But even then she gained
Her bower; whence re-issuing, robed and
crowned,

To meet her lord, she took the tax away
And built herself an everlasting name.

Observe-that I call up these modern writers and their language, out of their turn as may seem to you, only that I may plant more distinctly in your thought the old incidents to which their words relate. It is as if I were speaking to you of some long-gone line of ancestors, and on a sudden should call up some

totum, prater crura candidissima inde velavit." The tradition is subject of crude mention in the Polyolbion of DRAYTON; I also refer the reader to the charming Leofric and Godiva of LANDOR.

delicate blond child and say-This one is in the line of direct descent; she bears the same old tunes; and this shimmer of gold in her hair is what shone on the heads of the good Saxon foreparents.

WILLIAM THE NORMAN

We now come to a date to be remembered, and in the neighborhood of which our first morning's talk will come to an end. It is the date of the Norman Conquest-1066—that being the year of the Battle of Hastings, when the brave Harold, last of the Saxon kings went down, shot through the eye; and the lithe, clean-faced, smirking William of Normandy "gat him" the throne of England. These newcomers were not far-away cousins of our Saxon and Danish forefathers; only so recently as the reign of Alfred had they taken permanent foothold in that pleasant Norman country.

But they have not brought the Norse speech of the old home land with them: they have taken to a Frankish language—we will call it Norman French-which is thenceforth to blend with the Saxonism of Alfred, until two centuries or more later, our own mother Eng