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

and you

should go there

arches of Ely Cathedral 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

centuries of annual commemoration.* Tennyson

tells, in his always witching way, how

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

*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 totum, prater crura candidissima inde relavit." 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.