swallowed by the large; every where that | wretched, because false and hollow, system prevailing, under which masses of men lose the substance of freedom, and live and act only as the lords of the land allow them. The King had to seize for himself the old local rights which had once belonged to the people, in order to exercise them for the people's benefit. Men placed in high authority (of course by those who had the real power in their hands) Alfred found unable to read or write, and unacquainted with the commonest principles of justice; and so iniquitous had the administration become in consequence, that complaints poured in from all parts of the country. In the old Mirrour for Magistrates, there is a story that he had to hang forty-four judges-and there is nothing more likely. So, again, the fine old liberties of feud, by which men who had been deeply injured were allowed, under restrictions, to be their own avengers, had become a mere plea for lawlessness, and could not be any longer permitted. He did not venture, indeed, entirely to abolish it, but he fenced it round more and more with difficulties. All injuries had first to be referred to his officers, or to himself; and crimes, which under the older system had been of man against man, became, under the legislation of Alfred, crimes rather against the law, against himself, and against God.

Dr. Pauli does not like the story of the hanged judges, and prefers another, which to us has but an insipid monastic flavor. Asser, or the psuedo-Asser, says that the King summoned them into his presence, and read them a homily on the advantages of learning, forthwith obliging them either to go to school with the little boys and learn, or else lay down their high offices. "Then for that they would not resign might be seen bearded men at lesson in one form with the youngest children," &c. It may be true; but if it be true, let no man ever more plead internal improbability in the criticism of history. In such grim days as those, there was scarcely time or leisure for such feeble experimentalizing. There is rare virtue in your gallows; and from what we know of King Alfred, and that deep, earnest Christianity of his to which Dr. Pauli appeals, there never was a king with whom an unjust judge would have run a better chance of finding it. His Church reforming was a less successful affair. Church discipline, as Asser says, went against the grain of the Saxons; and the King had to depend altogether on foreigners to carry it out: Asser, a Welshman,

Grimbald, a French priest at St. Omer, John, perhaps Erigena, at any rate not an Englishman-these were his ecclesiastical reformers, and the work hung upon his hands. It was left for Dunstan, whose taste it suited better, to finish this. Alfred could never throw himself into it as an end in itself. With him the Church was valuable as an educator of the people, and it was mainly as such that he cared to keep it in activity.

Nothing (writes Pauli) is more delightful than to read what Alfred, with the help of these fellowworkmen, was trying to do for the laity. His own words show it most clearly.

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My desire is (he says) that the entire freeborn youth of this kingdom, who have means thereto, and so long as there be no other occupation which hinders them, shall receive so much instruction as shall enable them to read without difficulty in their own tongue; and that whosoever are to hold offices in the Church shall go on to learn the Latin.'

"Golden words-such as were rarely heard from the great men of those ages, and only long after they came to be spoken out again with equal vigor by the Protestant Reformers."

It is very grand-this brave, heroic man, slaving alone at so dead a labor. He saw the people were sliding down and down, and education was the only hope. But quis custodiat custodes, and who was to educate the educators? The history of Alfred is the history of a dead lift at the souls of a lazy race, in whom he knew there lay the seeds of rare virtue, if he could quicken them. But perhaps even his heart would have sunk in him, if he could have seen their descendants, after a life and death struggle of a thousand years, only now imperfectly winning back the lost ground, and still fighting for the boon which he believed he could confer himself.

So many years was Alfred before his time, as the phrase goes. Whatever time has brought out as most excellent in the English nature, either actively or in germ is found antedated in him.

We have seen him the soldier, the statesman, the Church reformer, the schoolmaster; besides these, he was the architect of his age, and the inventor of a new order. Ships of his designing were the swiftest and strongest in the channel. He was jeweller, clockmaker, engineer. There was no work done, or necessary to be done, high or low, in England, but Alfred was king and master there and everywhere. His navigators cruised in the Mediterranean. He sent exploring parties to Palestine, and even to India. One thing more remained, one work which, if any other person had pro

what they were, never failed to make something out of them.

"One day," says Asser, "we were sitting together in his room conversing as usual, when I quoted to him a certain passage. He listened with an eager attention; and then pointing to his little manuscript book, which he kept always about him, and which contained among other things the Daily Lessons, Psalms, and Prayers, bade me write into it what I had told him."

Asser, thanking heaven for the good mind. of the King, set himself immediately to work, when he found every corner of the parchment occupied-crammed full of notes on all sorts of subjects. He hesitated, he tells us, not knowing what to do. The King repeated his order. Asser replied, (what a strange, lov

posed it to himself as the exclusive labor of his life, might well make us smile at his presumption; but to the gigantic Alfred it was the amusement of his leisure. It was nothing less than to form a national literature. His people were to be taught to read in their native language, and there were no books for them; none, at least, except the poems, and these would serve but indifferently for the sole spiritual food of a people half actual heathens, and the other half of a very weak Christianity. So Alfred seriously set himself to create a prose Saxon literature; not to write new books, but to translate good old books, which, in passing through so great a mind as Alfred's, came out enriched and invigorated. They are to be read now by whoever chooses to read them. A jubilee edition we see is advertised; and what-ing imbecility there is in the way in which ever we may please to think of the doctrine, or the philosophy, or the actual knowledge, in all these he was as far in advance of his own age as he was in everything else which he undertook. He did not want to drive out the Scandinavian poetry; no man's heart could be the worse for reading that. And in the English versions of the old myths, the Titanic unearthly spirit which was first breathed into them among the snow mountains and lakes of Norway, had softened off into a warm and human heroism. Substantially and humanly Beowulf is more Christian than Norwegian, and no better Præparatio Evangelica could be given to young, high-hearted boys, provided there was an Evangile to interpret and to appropriate. It was not for Alfred to train a nation of devotees. He would make his people men-men because Christians, and Christians because men; and whatever was really manly and noble was sure of welcome with him.

But of course he would consider something more directly Christian as indispensable, and to this he set himself. Dr. Pauli follows lovingly through it all, and with the help of Asser lets us see how he went to work. First, there was the Common-place Book, which is now lost, but which William of Malmsbury had seen and studied; and the story of this is characteristic both of Asser and his master. The good Welshman, it seems, was employed in reading every book he could lay hands on aloud to the King, who had made it a second nature, day and night, no matter in what trouble he might be, either to read or to have some one read to him. And now that he had an understanding person about him, he would talk over the books; and, no matter

he tells the story :) "May it please you that I take a fresh parchment to write upon? Who knows but what we may soon light on something else which you may wish to have noted down; and then happily we may make a fresh collection."- "That is a good idea," replied he. And so Asser took a large, fresh square sheet, and wrote in his quotation; and he had rightly foreseen what might happen, for the very same day three new notes had to be inserted.

Most amiable and most sweet!--but it is not without its piteous side, when we have to remember that this poor Welshman was not only one of the best, but one of the ablest, men to be found in the island. And if such were his instruments, we may understand a good deal of work would remain on Alfred's own shoulders.

Besides this Common-place Book he translated or paraphrased the celebrated work of Boëthius, of which Dr. Pauli has given a sufficient account, with Anglo-Saxon extracts, as specimens of the style. The English reader will find an excellent analysis of it, with considerable portions very well translated, in Mr. Sharon Turner's Anglo-Saxons.

After this, Orosius' History of the World, which was written at the instigation of Augustin, as a controversial work, containing, from a Christian's point of view--but not an intolerant or ignorant one--a summary of the acts and fortunes of the great heathen nations:

St. Gregorie's Pastorals, a collection of legends of the Italian saints: to our palates insipid and tasteless enough; pretty much what the best of our modern novels may seem (if any are so unfortunate as to survive

so long) a thousand years deeper on in his- I feared that his children would have been tory. But they had their day of popularity and perhaps of usefulness, and were translated early into Greek, and even Arabic:

And Bede's History; all these being composed in the same manner; Asser or some one else translated the Latin viva voce, and Alfred supplied or omitted as he thought good, and rendered the whole into his own sound solid English.

Besides these, he composed a work on geography: an account of northern Europe, and the position in it of the various Teutonic nations. Dr. Pauli says it is far better than any that were then extant, and he was assisted in it by Ohthere, a mighty whalefisher, and others--sea-going adventurers, whose lives would as ill bear close scrutiny, perhaps, as that of old Ulysses. But they were the men for Alfred's purpose, and he used them for it.

Such was the first germ of a literature which Alfred bequeathed to his people. There was philosophy for them, and history and geography, and devotional books, and saints' lives for light reading; good food for all tastes and all capacities, and supplied, as we said, by himself, in the interval of other labors enough of themselves for ten ordinary men—οἵοι νὺν βρότοι εἴσι.

Truly might Alfred say of himself "While I live, I have no care except to live worthily, and to leave good works well done, to remain as my monument when I am gone.'

brought up little book-worms, who, at the first shock of life, would have bent and trembled down into a cloister. It is as unlike the truth as may be. His son, Edward, and his grandson, Athelstan, who had sat on his knee, and had learnt to bend bow and draw sword under his eyes, were men of his own noble metal-stout Christian warriors, who followed in his own ways; the grandest princes, except himself, who bore sword and sceptre among the Saxons. While Ethelfleda, his daughter, the lady of the Mercians, as she was called, (she had early married and early lost Ethelred the Mercian prince,) fought and won as many battles against the Danes, in her own person, as even her father. Never anywhere, since Homer's heroes disappeared, are there to be found such fiery fighters, so brave, and yet so tender and so humane, as in these three generations of this family.

One beautiful trait in Alfred Dr. Pauli has, we believe, been the first to notice in an unquestionable document-Alfred's will. The royal vill of Wantage, where he was born, and Ethendun, the deciding scene of his life, he bequeaths-not to the nation, not to the church, for pillars, or churches, or shrines, or statues to rise as ostentatious memorials of his greatness,-not to these at all, or for any such purpose, but to his wife. It is by her that the great King is still most proud to be remembered in connection with his highest achievements. He died at the age of 58, worn out early by work and disease. SinguSuch is something of the real life and larly, it is the same age at which England lost actions of this great man, as Dr. Pauli pre- her other greatest man, William Shakspeare. sents them to us. In this rapid sketch we A devout, God-fearing man he was from his have had to leave altogether much which is childhood to his end. Pauli sees this, and most beautiful; and we could only touch sees it in the soul of his greatness; but he lightly even what was of highest impor-will hear of no parallel between him and tance. In a short octavo, however, (only 300 pages long, and the writer of it a German!) Dr. Pauli's delicate criticism has drawn out the man before us, with his work all about him, in fine full-colored human proportions, and given life to the soul and sinew to the limbs of the stiff and feeble portraits which the monks have left us. Many extracts press upon us, but we must leave them now where they are, and half the incidents of his reign remain untold. It closed as it began-in storm; and the Chronicle, in its catalogue of years, contains still the same old recurring stories of Danish armies landing and fighting, though not any more with the old success attending them. In his own family, Alfred was as happy as he deserved to be. From Asser's story one might have

that other most Catholic King, in better favor with the ultra-montanes, Edward the Confessor.

"Edward lost his kingdom and found a place in the calendar. Alfred held his kingdom with his Church gave him no thanks for it. But he is not sword and with the help of God, and the Roman without a place in the hearts of his people, and with his works he lives there.

"So stands his monument, shining brightly in the book of the world's history; disfigured neither by ill-will nor by ignorance, and unblemished by any faults in himself. Not any prince or hero of old or modern times can be compared with him for so many excellences, and every one so pure. . With all the strength and all the greatness of the world's famous chieftains who have ruled over mightier peoples, there is ever some defect on the moral side which disfigures

From the Westminster Review.

MARY STUART.*