afford comfort and hope to the man who, with larger reasoning faculties, is exhausted with the buffetings of these strong winds that blow upon the great mountains of thought. Such a reasoner, however, is not thus buffeted in vain. As one who has striven with the 'power of the air,' perhaps, also, with waves and fire, he will have a front that inspires assurance-eyes that kindle aspirations. In him will many confidences be reposed. He will become a discerner of spirits, and will say to many an evil one-Come forth!' In his ordinary intercourse, he will unclose many a sealed fountain, and in special seasons his voice will be as the sound of abundance of rain,' after a time of drought and famine.

With respect to intercourse-as in regard to many other things— there is a remarkable inter-dependence between what is ordinary and what is uncommon. Free, light-hearted, ordinary speech, is necessary so to vivify and humanize a man's mind, that he shall be prepared for confidential intercourse, whilst such intercourse again is needed to give healthiness and purity to ordinary conversation. In general intercourse, we learn the varied and complicated morality of common life unconsciously, just as we learn our mother tongue. So must we learn, if we would have ease of manner, but not so alone, if we would have truth and correctness. Great is the value of common intercourse, when healthy, cheerful, and varied. Often, in disease or weariness of the soul, such intercourse affords the only refreshment and remedy; and gaiety comes like a wind to disperse the mists that have been engendered by solitude and sorrow. Rough, strong winds of externality, disperse the

miasma that broods over a morbid mind. There is a kind of sentimentalism which is the scrofula of the mind: it is disease, not depravity. In itself it disgusts; but the afflicted one is to be pitied. Want of fresh air infects the body with such disease; want of fresh, invigorating activity, of work, mirth, and discourse, affects the mind with it. We may almost weep for those who cannot laugh. It seems, therefore, a beautiful moral mechanism, that men of much humour have so often times of deep sadness, for thus the best mirth is never false and cruel, but in rousing and cheering, teaches and consoles.

Even if the laughter of the wisest is sometimes but as the 'crackling' of a passing blaze, it is the crackling of burning 'thorns,' that are now, in perishing, giving out light and heat for a few moments, instead of vexing for hours and days the bosom whose diseased growth they were. Often we laugh over our follies, and they are gone. Yet sometimes, in the remembrance of mirth there is sadness. It was as a wind 'that passeth and cometh not again; and the smile on the face was but as moonlight on a prison window-you saw not into the room because of the brightnessbut within were chains. We say this, because it is true; yet who is there that is not the better for a smile, much more for an hour's innocent mirth? Great laws of wisdom govern our lightest intercourse and its influences. Mirth is as truly a divine thing as

meditation; and good-humoured nonsense is a wild festooning plant, in the broad, sunny paradise of our spirit. Light on a bubble is true light even the light that illumes the world; its delicate, changeful colours result from the action of great general laws, and such laws may be discovered, or if known, better comprehended, by observing these bubbles, and experimenting on them and their colours. It were well if our highest, our religious intercourse, were as natural and innocent as our mirth often is. Much of our religious conversation is as mischievous as it is repulsive. Religion in the heart is like love; a great deal may have been felt, though very little has been spoken. Both long to utter themselves. Both speak, when they do give an utterance, in words which are as light—not for themselves, but for what they reveal. Speech becomes as a lamp, discovering with its small bright flame, wide replenished spaces, that silence, as the darkness, concealed. There are persons of the truest religious spirit that are quite incapable of talking their religion they can only look it, act it, and acknowledge it. see their religion in their life, and not in itself, as you see their life in their action, and not as separate therefrom. They know that the heaven is deep, blue, and very beautiful, and they delight greatly to look upon it but that is all. They cannot discourse to you of things great and wonderful, though their spirit is filled with their influence. This is especially true of women; the spirit of religion looks forth calmly from their eyes, and streams from them as silent, unseen, but powerful electric energy. Yet speech concerning religion is essential; and words of piety should be found among common words like flowers that grow hidden among leaves; they are modest, and obtrude not on the eye: yet, raise the leaves, and there they are, the true product of the plant, and its adornment; in them, also, the seed is nourished.

Lights of England in the Dark Ages.

ALFRED THE GREAT.

MODERN criticism makes strange havoc sometimes with our popular notions of history and its great personages. Not to travel beyond our own national records in search of instances, how shorn of his lustre does Richard the Lion-hearted appear in the pages of Pauli; whilst, on the other hand, that bloated tyrant and wife-killer, Harry the Eighth, has been transformed from a black-a-moor into a decently white, or, at worst, whitey - brown Christian, under the assiduous washings of Mr. Froude. In spite of "Ivanhoe," it is beginning to be pretty well known that the mirror of chivalry in his day was a bad son, bad brother, and bad king; a bad husband, too; and, most probably, not a bad father, only because his wife did not present him with that

name at all." Such is the acknowledgment wrung from Fraser's Magazine,' in a recent review of Pauli's 'History of England,' which the Times' has asserted is, although written by a foreigner, the only reliable one in existence. Of the success likely to be met with by Mr. Froude in his attempt to re-habilitate in the public estimation the royal sensualist and iron-fisted despot, whose memory Protestants and Papists have hitherto vied with each other in execrating, it would be premature to speak. But certain it is, that that gentleman has pointed out a very remarkable divergence between the contemporary and the posthumous judgments pronounced on Henry. That he was a most popular king must be taken to be sufficiently proved, and the fact is one, which, on the supposition that he actually was the monster he is usually represented to have been, imperatively demands explanation. Into the merits of the question as to how the discrepancy is to be adjusted, we, of course, cannot enter. It is sufficient for our purpose to observe that the traditional notion about the bluff old Tudor is in some degree of peril in consequence of the most recent researches. Need we remind the reader, too, that, in spite of Shakespere, it is now pretty certain that the usurper, Richard III., however morally deformed he may have been, was not, after all, a crook-backed dwarf, but a rather handsome man? Or that Cromwell, to adduce a case of the opposite kind, whilst he really had a wart on his face, as Carrion Heath and the rest of his covey malignantly croak, so far from being the consummate hypocrite they make him, was, rather, the most earnest man of the most earnest generation England has ever seen?

In view of facts like these, one naturally gets somewhat nervous as to the results of the searching scrutiny to which science persists in subjecting the reputations of our great national heroes. We look with suspicious eye upon the iconoclasts who have forced an entrance into our Walhalla, and we anxiously ask what venerable statue they are next about to smite with their remorseless mallet. Or we get indignant and restive, and demand their authority for wielding with such pitiless vigour the hammer of Thor. Helpless and vain, however, are all such protests against the alarming negative tendencies of the age. Our outcries should be directed against those who minted the lies, not against those who detect them. Falsehood can never grow into truth by any length of prescription; whilst, on the other hand, truth may grow into falsehood by amalgamation with it, and only by separation from the base alloy can it become truth once more. Hence, all really honest negative criticism, whether in history, theology, or what not, is, from a natural necessity, positive at the same time. By banishing the base coin from circulation, it brings about the revival of public confidence, and dissipates that scepticism which interfered with the passing of sterling money.

The fame of ALFRED has happily come forth unscathed from the ordeal to which it has been exposed. The best monograph upon the subject happens to be from the pen of Pauli himself, and it is some relief to find that this severe, but masterly, critic, so far from

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grudging our Saxon Charlemagne the traditional title of the Great,' hitherto universally accorded to him, furnishes us stronger reasons than ever for our national complacency in England's darling,' as the chroniclers affectionately style him. The Truthteller' was fortunate in finding a contemporary biographer, worthy the task of depicting one who had earned for himself so honourable an appellation. This was the pious and learned Asser, a monk of St. David's, whom Alfred lured from his cell, for the sake of his instructive conversation, and afterwards elevated to the see of Sherborne, in Dorsetshire. His 'Life of Alfred' has suffered somewhat from the hands of interpolators, but not to such an extent as to render it impossible to sift the chaff from the wheat.

Of KING ALFRED, the brave liberator of his people from the Danish filibusters, and the wise legislator, many of whose political institutions are still in vigour, it does not fall within the scope of this brief paper to speak. ALFRED, the Founder of English Literature, as with the strictest justice he is entitled to be called, is its topic, and with Guizot the Younger for our guide, who devotes to this branch of the subject full the half of his beautiful little work, Alfred le Grand,' which has just come to hand, there will be lack of space rather than of matter. If we prefix the briefest possible summary of the leading occurrences of his life and reign, it is simply with the view of furnishing a chronological thread on which to string the narrative of his heroic labours as the Educator of England.

ALFRED, the youngest of the four sons of Ethelwolf and Osberga, was born in the royal residence at Wantage, in Berkshire, on the 25th of October, A.D. 849. His father had then sat nine years on the throne of Wessex, to which all the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had been subjected by Egbert, in A.D. 828, who dying bequeathes the sovereignty to his son Ethelwolf, in A.D. 838. Ethelwolf was a weak prince, but Osberga was a woman of eminent piety, and to her Alfred was probably, in some measure, indebted for the decided religious bent which his character took. He must have lost her, however, before his seventh year, for in A.D. 856, his father, on his return from Rome, whither his youngest son had accompanied him on pilgrimage, married Judith, the eldest daughter of the Frankish king, Charles the Bald. This journey to the metropolis of the world must have made a deep impression upon the susceptible mind of the young prince, which had already begun to open under the fostering care of his mother. How early he manifested his unquenchable thirst for learning is proved by an anecdote which Asser thus relates: 'On a certain day his mother was showing him and his brother a Saxon book of poetry which she held in her hand, and said, "Whichever of you shall the soonest learn this volume by heart shall have it for his own." Stimulated by these words, or rather by the divine inspiration, and allured by the beautifully illuminated letter at the beginning of the volume, he spoke before all his brothers, who, though his seniors in years, were not so in grace, and answered, "Will you really give that book to one of us, that is to say, to him

who can first understand it, and repeat it to you?" At this his mother smiled with satisfaction, and confirmed what she had before said. Upon which the boy took the book out of her hand, and went to his master to read it, and in due time brought it to his mother and recited it." Asser adds, that after this he learnt the devotional hours of the Roman ritual, and certain psalms, although it was not until his twelfth year, so great was the scarcity of instructors at that time, that he was able to acquire the art of reading. A beautiful prayer of Alfred's own composition is preserved at the close of his translation of the treatise of Boethius, 'On the Consolation of Philosophy.' It runs thus: "O Lord God Almighty, the Creator and Sovereign of all the creatures! I beseech Thee, by thy great mercy, and by the sign of the Holy Cross, and by the virginity of the blessed Mary, and by the obedience of the blessed Saint Michael, and by the love of all the saints and by their merits, guide me better than I have hitherto known how to guide myself in the way of thy will, and to the salvation of my soul; teach me to press after these things earnestly; and strengthen me against the temptations of the devil, and root out of my heart all impurity and falsehood, and defend me against mine enemies, visible and invisible, and teach me to obey Thee, so that I may come to love Thee above all things, with a pure body and a pure mind; seeing that thou art my Creator and Redeemer; my succour and peace; my trust and hope. To Thee be praise and glory, both now and for evermore!

Amen.' Ethelwolf died in A.D. 858, and Alfred's brothers all successively mounted the throne; first Ethelbald, then Ethelbert, and, lastly, Ethelred, who, in A.D. 871, died of the wounds received in battle against the Danes, leaving the crown and these terrible pagan enemies of the Saxon name as a legacy to his successor. Alfred was at that time twenty-two years of age, and two years before he had married Ealsworth, a daughter of the royal line of Mercia. His thirty years' reign, til his death, in A.D. 901, was an almost unbroken agony against the heathen invaders, with whom, in the very year of his accession, no fewer than eight pitched battles were fought, with very varied success. Scarcely had he seated himself upon the throne when he was fain to purchase from them a treacherous peace in favour of Wessex, leaving them to consolidate their power in other portions of the Heptarchy, which they had no sooner done than they flung their obligations to the winds, and threw themselves afresh upon his dominions. Again he endeavoured to bind them with the green withs of a treaty (A.D. 876), which they broke the very next year, and pressed the young king so hard, that he was compelled to lay aside his regalia for a time, and to seek a refuge in an almost inaccessible island formed by the river Parret, in Somersetshire (A.D. 878). This first seven years of his reign afforded but little promise of the glory which gilded the remainder. Hints are thrown out of his having ruled oppressively, and even of his having been addicted to occasional debauchery; and these things, together with his ill-success