latter, giving them the education which he had missed in his own youth.

To his eldest son and distinguished successor he gave his dying counsel thus:-"I pray thee (for thou art my dear child) strive to be a father and a lord to thy people. Be thou the children's father and the widow's friend. Comfort thou the poor and shelter the weak; and with all thy might right that which is wrong. And, son, govern thyself by law; then shall the Lord love thee, and God above all things shall be thy reward."

Alfred died in 901; and well might his subjects mourn when they no longer saw among them those beautiful blue eyes which, full of truth, had looked down on an unstable world. Of rare wisdom as a king, this saint and soldier, this child-like, teachable scholar, had indeed fulfilled his own wish:-"I have desired to live worthily while I lived, and after my life to leave to those that should be after me a remembrance in good works.”

Edmund II. (son)

...

Edward the Confessor (son of Ethelred)
Harold II. (son of Earl Godwin) ..

QUESTIONS.-Give an account of the introduction of Christianity into Britain. Who was Alfred? For what is he chiefly remarkable? Say all you can of the Saxon manners and customs. What was the Witanagemot?

THE DANES IN ENGLAND.

Ir wanted rather more than a dozen years to the end of the eighth century, when England, as we may now call our country, was again invaded. The unwelcome visitors were those Northmen, who, in England, went by the name of Danes. Being Teutons, they were of the same family as the Saxons; but while the latter had become in a measure civilised and Christianised, the Danes were still pagans, and frightfully savage and lawless, despising their Anglo-Saxon brethren for their Christianity.

Scandinavia was at this period portioned out in little kingdoms, many of them much smaller than an English county. As only one son could inherit the throne on his father's death, it was the custom for the others to become sea-kings, or what we should now call searobbers. Nor was this practice limited to royalty, for piracy was esteemed a very honourable profession among them. Even the land-kings could not make up their minds to keep quite clear of it, though they only followed it as a recreation in summer.

All Europe lived in terror of the sea-kings. It was their habit, their business, to kill, and burn, and lay waste; and it was a woeful day for the inhabitants, wherever it might be, who beheld the little Danish barks steer shoreward, bearing their banner of the Raven.

They neither showed nor expected mercy, and where they appeared with their long, red hair, and their heavy golden bracelets, there misery reigned. They would slay the infant in its mother's arms, and to complete the picture of ferocity, they ate raw flesh.

Legends tell us that sometimes an old sea-king rather than die a peaceful death, would order himself to be placed alone in a vessel, which, having been set on fire, was turned adrift upon the sea, that as it burned to the water's edge he and it might go down together, while he sang one of the wild songs which they prized so much:

"I am coming, said the king,

Where the swords and bucklers ring,
Where the warrior lives again

With the souls of mighty men.

I am coming, great All-father, unto Thee!
Unto Odin, unto Thor,

And the true, strong hearts of yore,

I am coming to Valhalla o'er the sea."

The Danes wintered in England for the first time in 851. A few years before Alfred's accession, a famous sea-king, Rognar Ladbrog, was wrecked on the coast of Northumbria. The king of that state, rejoicing to get his dreaded enemy into his power, took him prisoner after a desperate resistance, and put him to a cruel death. Rognar's sons and kinsfolk terribly avenged him. They seized the whole of Northumbria, and from thence invaded the rest of England.

In 870, one year before Alfred became king, they sailed down the Humber and frightfully wasted Lincolnshire, where a little band of Saxons, under the Earl Algar, manfully stood their ground until nearly all of them were slain. The Danes attacked the celebrated Abbey of Croyland. Many of the monks fled, and the abbey was drenched with the blood of those who remained. The barbarians then marched upon Peterborough monastery, which was one of the finest buildings in England, situated in the best part of the fen country. They sacked

it, and set it on fire. Ely, its church, its convent, and its nuns, perished by the same ruthless hands.

When Alfred received the crown, Wessex alone remained unconquered. We have seen that even he was compelled to allow the Danes to keep the large territory of the Danelagh. The roving sea-kings, who did not cease at times to trouble him, returned in the reign of his son, Edward the Elder; and also in that of his grandson, the golden-haired Athelstan, who at last overcame them in the tremendous battle of Brunnanburgh, in which five Danish kings were slain.

Athelstan died in 941; and in the short, disturbed reigns of his successors the Danes renewed their aggressions; but the depths of humiliation were not reached until the time of Ethelred II., who became king in 978, and reigned through thirty-eight miserable years.. "A sleeping king," as an old writer has called him, he utterly failed to stem the torrent of invasion; and the base treachery of some of his own nobles, did much to ruin his cause. His most noted enemy was Olave, king of Norway, who had embraced Christianity, and had then set about converting his subjects, like a true son of Odin, by force and violence. Still he was a real reformer, as far as his knowledge went, and forbade plunder to the sea-kings, who had already begun to add commerce to their profession of robbery.

It was in 994, that Olave, and Sweyn, king of Denmark, sailed up the Thames, and though driven back from London, successfully attacked the south and east coast. Ethelred offered to buy them off, and they agreed. Olave came to the court of the Saxon king, promising never more to injure England, and he faithfully kept his word. He afterwards assisted Ethelred; and the church of St. Olave, in Southwark, was one of the four which were consecrated to his memory.

Sweyn and his followers soon resumed their old work of destruction. They tried several times to take London, and one of their naval stations was at Deptford, or

the deep fiord. Again Ethelred purchased with money a peace soon broken. Then by a shameful and treacherous deed-the massacre of St. Brice's day-he sought to slay suddenly, by taking them unaware, the Danes who were living in England beyond the bounds of the Danelagh. Gunhilda, the sister of Sweyn, with her husband and son, were among the victims.

The Danes came without loss of time to avenge their countrymen. War and bloodshed defaced the land again, and again gold bought a vain, brief truce. Soon Sweyn set forth himself, and his little vessels with gold and silver lions and eagles glittering on their bows, sailed up the Humber, where his brethren of the Danelagh were waiting to join him; and Saxon England groaned once more in the horrors of a barbarian invasion. Even London yielded at last, and Ethelred fled.

Sweyn died, and the Danes chose his son Canute as king; but the Witanagemot would not submit to that, and proposed that Ethelred should resume his crown on condition of doing better; but he never regained his authority. After his death, his brave, resolute son, Edmund Ironside, maintained the contest, sometimes victoriously, on many a hard-fought field, until at the battle of Assandun he was defeated with a great slaughter of his nobility. He then consented to divide the kingdom, but his death soon afterwards, left Canute without a rival, and the Witanagemot elected him to the sole sovereignty. He thus added the crown of England to those of Denmark and Norway, and the Dane ruled over the Saxon.

Canute declared himself a Christian, though the fierceness of the heathen sea-king was by no means effaced. Many savage deeds are associated with his name, but it is fair to remember that when his throne was firmly established, he governed his Danish and Saxon subjects for twenty years with a strong but equal hand.

Two worthless sons successively reigned after him,