with calmness the tumult, terror, and confusion of that scene. Mr. Arbuthnot strove to bear his wife from the apartment, but she would not be forced away, but kept imploring with frenzied vehemence that Robert-that her boy should not be taken from her.

'I have no wish to do so-far from it,' said Danby with gleeful exultation. Only folk must be reasonable, and not threaten their friends with the hulks'

'Give him anything, anything!' broke in the unhappy lady. 'O Robert! Robert!' she added with a renewed burst of hysterical grief, 'how could you deceive me so?'

'I have been punished, Agnes,' he answered in a husky, broken voice, for my well-intending but criminal weakness; cruelly punished by the everpresent consciousness that this discovery must one day or other be surely made. What do you want?' he after awhile added with recovering firmness, addressing Danby.

"The acknowledgement of the little bit of paper in dispute, of course; and say a genuine one to the same amount.'

True

husband found and opened, would have informed
you of the swiftly approaching death of my child,
and that yours had been carefully kept beyond the
reach of contagion. The letter you received was
written without my knowledge or consent.
it is that, terrified by my husband's threats, and
in some measure reconciled to the wicked imposi
tion by knowing that, after all, the right child
would be in his right place, I afterwards lent
myself to Danby's evil purposes. But I chiefly
feared for my son, whom I fully believed he would
not have scrupled to make away with in revenge
for my exposing his profitable fraud. I have
sinned; I can hardly hope to be forgiven, but I
have now told the sacred truth.'

All this was uttered by the repentant woman, but, at the time, it was almost wholly unheard by those most interested in the statement. They only comprehended that they were saved-that the child was theirs in very truth. Great, abundant, but for the moment, bewildering joy! Mr. Arbuthnot-his beautiful young wife her own true boy (how could she for a moment have doubted that he was her own true boy!-you might read 'Yes, yes,' exclaimed Mrs. Arbuthnot, still that thought through all her tears, thickly as they wildly sobbing, and holding the terrified boy fel!)-the aged and half-stunned rector, whilst yet strained in her embrace, as if she feared he might Mrs. Danby was speaking, were exclaiming, sobbe wrenched from her by forcé. Anything-bing in each other's arms, ay, and praising God pay him anything!' too, with broken voices and incoherent words it may be, but certainly with fervent, pious, grateful hearts.

་

At this moment chancing to look towards the door of the apartment, I saw that it was partially opened, and that Danby's wife was listening there. What might that mean? But what of helpful meaning in such a case could it have?

'Be it so, love,' said Mr. Arbuthnot, soothingly. 'Danby, call to-morrow at the Park. And now, begone at once.'

"I was thinking,' resumed the rascal with swelling audacity, that we might as well at the same time come to some permanent arrangement upon black and white. But never mind: I can always put the screw on; unless, indeed, you get tired of the young gentleman, and in that case, I doubt not, he will prove a dutiful and affectionate son Ah, devil! What do you here? Begone, or I'll murder you! Begone, do you hear?

་

His wife had entered, and silently confronted him. Your threats, evil man,' replied the woman quietly, have no terrors for me now. My son is beyond your reach. Oh, Mrs. Arbuthnot,' she added, turning towards and addressing that lady, believe not'

Her husband sprang at her with the bound of a panther. 'Silence! Go home, or I'll strangle'

-His own utterance was arrested by the fierce grasp of Mr. Arbuthnot, who seized him by the throat, and hurled him to the further end of the room. 'Speak on, woman; and quick! quick! What have you to say?'

That your son, dearest lady,' she answered, throwing herself at Mrs. Arbuthnot's feet, 'is as truly your own child as ever son born of woman!' That shout of half-fearful triumph seems, even now as I write, to ring in my ears! I felt that the woman's words were words of truth, but I could not see distinctly: the room whirled round, and the lights danced before my eyes, but I could hear through all the choking ecstacy of the mother, and the fury of the baffled felon.

'The letter,' continued Mrs. Danby, 'which my

When we had time to look about us, it was found that the felon had disappeared-escaped. has not been heard of since. It was well, perhaps, that he had; better, that he

OCCASION.

"Say, who art thou, with more than mortal air,
Endowed by Heaven with gifts and graces rare,
Whom restless, winged feet for ever onward bear?"
"I am Occasion-known to few, at best;
And since one foot upon a wheel I rest,
Constant my movements are-they cannot be
repressed.

"Not the swift eagle, in his swiftest flight,
Can equal me in speed-my wings are bright,
And man, who sees them waved, is dazzled by the
sight.

"My thick and flowing locks before me thrown,
Conceal my form-nor face, nor breast is shown,
That thus as I approach, my coming be not known.
"Behind my head no single lock of hair
Invites the hand that fain would grasp it there,
But he who lets me pass, to seize me may despair."

"Whom, then, so close behind thee do I see ?"
"Her name is Penitence; and Heaven's decree
Hath made all those her prey who profit not by me.
"And thou, O mortal! who dost vainly ply
These curious questions; thou dost not descry,
That now thy time is lost-for I am passing by."

undoubtedly, like all the rest of our nature, to be educated, that is to say, to have their potency changed from tyrannizing over us, to serving under us, even as the fire, and the water, and the beasts of the field, which also all aspire to be our masters, are converted by art into our most useful ministers and subjects, and made, as it were, to come and lay down their strength at our feet. Our business is to seek not to destroy our imagination, but to obtain the rule over it,-not to weaken, but to direct, its force. He whose imagination is his lord, is a madman; but he, on the other hand, is armed with the mightiest of all moral powers, whose imagination is his wielded and obedient instrument. It was fortunate, we must, therefore, hold, for Alfred to have had his sensibilities thus early kindled to the love of poetry. This was excitement enough to keep his intellectual faculties from wasting away, during the protracted period when he was yet without the elements of any other education. And who shall say how much, not of the enjoyment merely, but even of the greatness, of his future life was the offspring of that imaginative culture of his youth, which, as it must have smitten his spirit with its first love of heroic deeds, so would often supply it afterwards with its best strength for their performance. He himself at least retained ever after the deepest regard and reverence for that simple lore which had thus been the light and solace of his otherwise illiterate boyhood. Many of his compositions which have come down to us are in verse, and we are told by his friend and biographer, Asser, that not only was the poetry of his native land his own favourite reading, but that, in directing the education of his children, it was to Saxon books, and especially to Saxon poetry, that he ordered their hours of study to be devoted. The indulgence of his parents was probably, in part at least, the cause of his long ignorance of book-learning. But, however this may be, he had reached his twelfth year, Asser tells us, without knowing his letters, when one day his mother showed him and his brothers, a small volume somewhat gaily illuminated, and announced that the book should be the prize of him who should first learn to read it. Alfred immediately put himself into the hands of a teacher, and, although the youngest of the competitors, was in no long time able to claim the promised reward. From this period he continued to be throughout his life so ardent and de-sciousness of their strength, are asserted to have voted a reader, that, even when most oppressed with occupation, he was rarely to be found, if he had the shortest interval of repose, without a book in his hand.

this time, and the steady virtues of his manhood, forbid us to suppose that he could have proceeded very far in such a course. Even after Ethelred became king, he still continued to be deprived of the independent provision which had been bequeathed to him; his brother, who, before his accession, had promised to see his rights restored, now excusing himself from performing his intention, on the ground of the troubled state of the kingdom, harassed as it was almost continually by those Danish pirates, who had first appeared on its coasts in the reign of Egbert, but had for some years past been in the habit of making their descents in such augmented force as to dispute the possession of the country with its natural occupants. From this date, however, he seems to have been brought forth from the obscurity in which he had hitherto lived; and his brother's estimate of his talents, indeed, is said to have been so great, that he employed him both as his principal adviser or minister in the general government of the realm, and as the commander-in-chief of his armies. In this latter capacity he repeatedly encountered the Danes with various success. At last he allowed himself to be drawn into an engagement with them as they were collected in formidable numbers near Reading; the issue of which threatened to be a total defeat of the English, when a fresh force arrived under the command of the king himself, and so entirely turned the fortune of the day, that the Danes were completely routed with the loss of many of their chiefs. Their disaster, however, was far from driving the invaders from the country; on the contrary, they boldly attacked the two brothers about a fortnight after, and beat them; and this success they followed up without loss of time by another attack, which terminated in a second victory; and in which, as already related, King Ethelred was mortally wounded. The crown, therefore, now fell to Alfred, by whom, however, his original biographer assures us, it was assumed with reluctance. The jewelled circlet, always lined with cares, had almost in this case, indeed, to be won before it could be worn.

Up to the time when Ethelred mounted the throne, as related in the preceding historical sketch, Alfred had never succeeded in obtaining from his brothers the property to which he was entitled by his father's will; and, owing to this cause, he seems to have been unable to provide himself either with books or instructors even in the few branches of science and of more refined scholarship which were then cultivated. There is some reason to believe that, in the recklessness produced by the untoward circumstances in which he was thus placed, his noble energies had already threatened to lose themselves in a career of dissipation and profligacy. But both his years at

Scarcely had Alfred laid his brother in the grave when he was again forced to meet the enemy at Wilton. The consequence was a third defeat. It was followed by a treaty, which, however, the Danes, rendered audacious by the con

regarded just as far as it suited their inclinations
or convenience. In the course of a few years
Alfred found it necessary again to have recourse
to arms; and he now resolved to meet the in-
vaders on their own element, the sea.
He ac-
cordingly fitted out a fleet, which soon afterwards
attacked a squadron of five Danish ships, and
took one of them. The foreigners, however, still
maintained their position in the country in for-
midable numbers, quartering, plundering, and
laying waste wherever they chose. Finding
himself not strong enough to offer them battle,
Alfred was obliged in 875 to make a new peace
with them, or rather indeed to buy a cessation of
hostilities. But the very next year he was forced
to renew the war, which, with desperate vigour,
he now pushed at once both by sea and land.
Collecting all the forces he could, he shut up the

It ton.

The arrival of these new hordes was the signal for the revolt of large numbers of their countryinen who were settled in different parts of the kingdom, so that the situation of Alfred seemed now more perilous than ever. pared, however, to face the crisis with his characteristic boldness, skill, and activity. Various battles ensued, at Farnham in Surrey, at Exeter, and elsewhere, in all of which the English, led by their heroic monarch, were victorious. The Danes, however, were still far from being subdued, being in fact no sooner repulsed in one part of the country than they carried their devastations into another. A powerful band of them having come up the Thames, landed about twenty

miles from London, and there built a fort. From this stronghold, however, Alfred drove them by cutting certain trenches which left their ships dry, and then burning and destroying such of them as could not be got off. This and other successes at last reduced these barbarians again to subjection and quiet, after the war had continued for about three years, during a considerable portion of which time the miseries of famine and plague followed every where the ravages of the sword. A maritime engagement on the coast of Devonshire, in which five out of six ships of the enemy were sunk or driven on shore, concluded the triumphs of the English arms. The few remaing years of Alfred's reign were spent in tranquillity, of which he took advantage to repair the many mischiefs and disorders which so long a season of turbulence had introduced, and to establish such institutions as might secure the future prosperity of the kingdom.

pains or cost to bring back and re-establish among his people that higher learning which the recent distractions had almost entirely banished. He was, according to some accounts, the founder of the university of Oxford; and it seems probable that he fixed and endowed a seminary of some description or other on the site afterwards occupied by this famous seat of education. So utterly had literature been extirpated from the land, that any one almost but Alfred would have looked upon the attempt to restore it as an altogether hopeless and impossible enterprise. The very few learned men-they do not appear to have been above three or four in number-who had survived the confusions and miseries to which the kingdom had so long been a prey, remained concealed and unheard of in remote religious retirements, which, naturally distrustful of the new-born and as yet unconfirmed tranquility, hardly any temptation could prevail upon them to leave. Alfred, neverin-theless, left no efforts untried to attract to his court these depositories of the light; and his biographer, Asser, who was himself one of those whom he thus brought around him, has given us some very curious and illustrative details of the manner in which he was sought out and tempted from his monastery among the mountains in Wales by the good king. It was under the tuition of Asser that Alfred first carried his own acquaintance with literature beyond the knowledge of his mother-tongue, and engaged in the study of Latin. He had already reached his thirty-ninth year; but the time he had lost only spurred him to more zealous exertion, and he soon made such proficiency as to be able to read that language with ease. In his ardent and philanthrophic mind, however, his new acquisition was not long permitted to remain a source of merely selfish gratification. He resolved that his people should have their share in his own advantages, and with this view he immediately set about the translation for public use of several of the works by which he had himself been most delighted, or which he conceived most likely to be generally serviceable.

It is generally allowed that Englishmen are debted to this illustrious monarch, if not for the contrivance and first introduction, at any rate for the restoration and improvement, of several of their most valuable still existing safeguards of liberty and order. He did not, indeed, establish a representative government; but he ordered that the great council of the nation-the only species of legislative assembly suitable to the circumstances of the country in that age-should meet at least twice every year, thus providing a parliamentary, if not a popular check of considerable importance upon his own authority and that of his successors. The general application of trial by jury to civil and criminal cases is also thought to be due to Alfred. The common law is supposed to be founded principally on the regulations for the punishment of offences and the dispensing of justice which he promulgated. He settled the boundaries of the parishes, hundreds, into counties into which England still continues to be divided, and accomplished a survey of the whole, the results of which he caused to be recorded in what was called the book of Winchester, the foundation of the famous Doomsday Book, compiled two centuries afterwards by the The first work which he undertook appears to Conqueror. By an ingeniously arranged system have been the Liber Pastoralis Cura of Pope of police also, he placed every man in his domin- Gregory, a treatise on ecclesiastical discipline, ions as it were under his eye, so that it is said which he intended as a directory for the clergy. offences against property and the public peace In an introductory address, in the form of an became eventually almost unknown, and the king epistle to the bishop of London, which he prefixed was wont, by way of putting the sovereignty of to his translation of this performance, he states the laws to the proof, even to expose articles of that when he began his reign there was not, so gold on the highways without any one daring to far as he knew, one priest to the south of the touch them. He founded new towns in differ-Thames who understood the prayers of the coment parts of the kingdom, and restored many of the old ones which had fallen into decay. London especially, which, when he came to the throne, was in the possession of the Danes, he rebuilt, extended, and chose as his principal residence and the seat of government. To Alfred, likewise, England is indebted for the beginning of her naval greatness,--that arm of her national power which is at once the strongest for good and the weakest for evil.

Nor did this wise and patriotic king neglect the civilization any more than the defence and political independence of his country. He not only established schools for elementary instruction in most of the different great towns, but spared no

mon church service, or could in fact translate a sentence of Latin into English. After this he either wrote or translated himself, or caused to be translated, so many books, that we may consider him as not only having laid the foundations of a literature for his country, but as having carried the superstructure to no ordinary height and extent. Among his other versions from the Latin is one of Boethius's "Consolations of Philosophy," which is in many respects rather an original work than a translation, the author's text being often expanded, or for a time entirely departed from, in order that he may introduce new ideas and illustrations of his own, many of which are in the highest degree interesting from their re