Though sallow-faced, Lincoln had a very good constitution, but his frame hardly bespoke great strength: he was six feet four and large-boned, but narrow chested, and had almost a consumptive appearance. His strength, nevertheless, was great. We are told that harnessed with ropes and straps he could lift a box of stones weighing from a thousand to twelve hundred pounds. But that he could raise a cask of whiskey in his arms standing upright, and drink out of the bung-hole, his biographer does not believe. The story is no doubt a part of the legendary halo which has gathered round the head of the martyr. In wrestling, of which he was very fond, he had not his match near Pigeon Creek, and only once found him anywhere else. He was also formidable as a pugilist. But he was no bully; on the contrary, he was peaceable and chivalrous in a rough way. His chivalry once displayed itself in a rather singular fashion. He was in the habit, among other intellectual exercises, of writing satires on his neighbours in the form of chronicles, the remains of which, unlike any known writings of Moses, or even of Washington, are "too indecent for publication." In one of these he assailed the Grigsbys, who had failed to invite him to a brilliant wedding. The Grigsby blood took fire, and a fight was arranged. But when they came to the ring, Lincoln, deeming the Grigsby champion too much overmatched, magnanimously substituted for himself his less puissant stepbrother, John Johnston, who was getting well pounded when Abe, on pretence of foul play, interfered, seized Grigsby by the neck, flung him off and cleared the ring. He then "swung a whiskey bottle over his head, and swore that he was the big buck of the lick,"—a proposition which it seems, the other bucks of the lick, there assembled in large numbers, did not feel themselves called upon to dispute.

That Abraham Lincoln should have said, when a bare-legged boy, that he intended to be President of the United States, is not remarkable. Every boy in the United States says it; soon, perhaps, every girl will be able to say it, and then human happiness will be complete. But Lincoln was really carrying on his political education. Dennis Hanks is asked how he and Lincoln acquired their knowledge. "We learned," he replies, "by sight, scent and hearing. We heard all that was said, and talked over and over the questions heard; wore them slick, greasy and threadbare. Went to political and other speeches and gatherings, as you do now; we would hear all sides and opinions, talk them over, discuss them, agreeing or disagreeing. Abe, as I said before, was originally a Democrat after the order of Jackson; so was his father, so we all were.... He preached, made speeches, read for us, explained to us, &c.... Abe was a cheerful boy, a witty boy; was humorous always, sometimes would get sad, not very often.... Lincoln would frequently make political and other speeches; he was calm, logical and clear always. He attended trials, went to court always, read the Revised Statutes of Indiana, dated 1824, heard law speeches, and listened to law trials. Lincoln was lazy, a very lazy man. He was always reading, scribbling, writing, ciphering, writing poetry, and the like.... In Gentryville, about one mile west of Thomas Lincoln's farm, Lincoln would go and tell his jokes and stories, &c., and was so odd, original and humorous and witty, that all the people in town would gather around him. He would keep them there till midnight. I would get tired, want to go home, cuss Abe most heartily. Abe was a good talker, a good reader, and was a kind of newsboy." One or two articles written by Abe found their way into obscure journals, to his infinite gratification. His foot was on the first round of the ladder. It is right to say that his culture was not solely political, and that he was able to astonish the natives of Gentryville by explaining that when the sun appeared to set, it "was we did the sinking and not the sun."

Abe was tired of his home, as a son of Thomas Lincoln might be, without disparagement to his filial piety; and he was glad to get off with a neighbour on a commercial trip down the river to New Orleans. The trip was successful in a small way, and Abe soon after repeated it with other companions. He shewed his practical ingenuity in getting the boat off a dam, and perhaps still more signally in quieting some restive hogs by the simple expedient of sewing up their eyes. In the first trip the great emancipator came in contact with the negro in a way that did not seem likely to prepossess him in favour of the race. The boat was boarded by negro robbers, who were repulsed only after a fray in which Abe got a scar which he carried to the grave. But he saw with his own eyes slaves manacled and whipped at New Orleans; and though his sympathies were not far-reaching, the actual sight of suffering never failed to make an impression on his mind. "In 1841," he says, in a letter to a friend, "you and I had together a tedious low-water trip on a steamboat from Louisville to St. Louis. You may remember, as I well do, that from Louisville to the mouth of the Ohio, there were on board ten or a dozen slaves shackled together with irons. That sight was a continued torment to me, and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio or any other slave border." A negrophilist he never became. "I protest," he said afterwards, when engaged in the slavery controversy, "against the counterfeit logic which concludes that because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either. I can just leave her alone. In some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread which she earns with her own hands she is my equal and the equal of all others." It would be difficult to put the case better.

While Abraham Lincoln was trading to New Orleans his father, Thomas Lincoln, was on the move again. This time he migrated to Illinois, and there again shifted from place to place, gathering no moss, till he died as thriftless and poor as he had lived. We have, in later years, an application from him to his son for money, to which the son responds in a tone which implies some doubt as to the strict accuracy of the ground on which the old gentleman's request was preferred. Their relations were evidently not very affectionate, though there is nothing unfilial in Abe's conduct. Abraham himself drifted to Salem on the Sangamon, in Illinois, twenty miles north-west of Springfield, where he became clerk in a new store, set up by Denton Offutt, with whom he had formed a connection in one of his trips to New Orleans. Salem was then a village of a dozen houses, and the little centre of a society very like that of Pigeon Creek and its neighbourhood, but more decidedly western. We are told that "here Mr. Lincoln became acquainted with a class of men the world never saw the like of before or since. They were large men,—large in body and large in mind; hard to whip and never to be fooled. They were a bold, daring and reckless set of men; they were men of their own mind,—believed what was demonstrable, were men of great common sense. With these men Mr. Lincoln was thrown; with them he lived and with them he moved and almost had his being. They were sceptics all—scoffers some. These scoffers were good men, and their scoffs were protests against theology,—loud protests against the follies of Christianity; they had never heard of theism and the new and better religious thoughts of this age. Hence, being natural sceptics and being bold, brave men they uttered their thoughts freely.... They were on all occasions, when opportunity offered, debating the various questions of Christianity among themselves; they took their stand on common sense and on their own souls; and though their arguments were rude and rough, no man could overthrow their homely logic. They riddled all divines, and not unfrequently made them sceptics,—disbelievers as bad as themselves. They were a jovial, healthful, generous, true and manly set of people." It is evident that W. Herndon, the speaker, is himself a disbeliever in Christianity, and addicted to the "newer and better thought of this age." He gives one specimen, which we have omitted for fear of shocking our readers, of the theological criticism of these redoubtable logicians of nature; and we are inclined to infer from it that the divines whom they "riddled" and converted to scepticism must have been children of nature as well as themselves. The passage, however, is a life-like, though idealized, portrait of the Western man; and the tendency to religious scepticism of the most daring kind is as truly ascribed to him as the rest.

It seems to be proved by conclusive evidence that Mr. Lincoln shared the sentiments of his companions, and that he was never a member of any Church, a believer in the divinity of Christ, or a Christian of any denomination. He is described as an avowed, an open freethinker, sometimes bordering on atheism, going extreme lengths against Christian doctrines, and "shocking" men whom it was probably not very easy to shock. He even wrote a little work on "Infidelity," attacking Christianity in general, and especially the belief that Jesus was the Son of God; but the manuscript was destroyed by a prescient friend, who knew that its publication would ruin the writer in the political market. There is reason to believe that Burns contributed to Lincoln's scepticism, but he drew it more directly from Volney, Paine, Hume and Gibbon. His fits of downright atheism appear to have been transient; his settled belief was theism with a morality which, though he was not aware of it, he had really derived from the Gospel. It is needless to say that the case had never been rationally presented to him, and that his decision against Christianity would prove nothing, even if his mind had been more powerful than it was. His theism was not strong enough to save him from deep depression under misfortune; and we heard, on what we thought at the time good authority, that after Chancellorsville, he actually meditated suicide. Like many sceptics, he was liable to superstition, especially to the superstition of self-consciousness, a conviction that he was the subject of a special decree made by some nameless and mysterious power. Even from a belief in apparitions he was not free. "It was just after my election, in 1860," he said to his Secretary, John Hay, "when the news had been coming in thick and fast all day, and there had been a great 'hurrah, boys!' so that I was well tired, I went home to rest, throwing myself upon a lounge in my chamber. Opposite to where I lay was a bureau with a swinging glass upon it; and, on looking in that glass, I saw myself reflected nearly at full length; but my face, I noticed, had two separate and distinct images, the tip of the nose of one being about three inches from the tip of the other. I was a little bothered, perhaps startled, and got up and looked in the glass; but the illusion vanished. On lying down again I saw it a second time—plainer, if possible, than before; and then I noticed that one of the faces was a little paler—say five shades—than the other. I got up and the thing melted away; and I went off and in the excitement of the hour forgot all about it,—nearly, but not quite, for the thing would once in a while come up and give me a little pang, as though something uncomfortable had happened. When I went home I told my wife about it; and in a few days afterwards I tried the experiment again, when, sure enough, the thing came back again; but I never succeeded in bringing the ghost back after that, though I once tried very industriously, to show it to my wife, who was worried about it somewhat. She thought it was 'a sign' that I was to be elected to a second term of office, and that the paleness of one of the faces was an omen that I should not see life through the last term." The apparition is, of course, easily explained by reference to a generally morbid temperament and a specially excited fancy. The impression which it made on the mind of a sceptic, noted for never believing in anything which was not actually submitted to his senses, is an instance of the tendency of superstition to creep into the void left in the heart by faith, and as such may be classed with the astrological superstitions of the Roman Empire, and of that later age of religious and moral infidelity of which the prophet was Machiavelli. But if Mr. John Hay has faithfully repeated Lincoln's words, a point upon which we may have our doubts without prejudice to Mr. Hay's veracity, Mrs. Lincoln's interpretation of the vision is, to say the least, a very curious coincidence.

The flower of the heroic race in the neighbourhood of Salem, were the "Clary's Grove boys," whose chief and champion was Jack Armstrong. "Never," we are assured, "was there a more generous parcel of ruffians than those over whom Jack held sway." It does not appear, however, that the term ruffian is altogether misplaced. The boys were in the habit of "initiating" candidates for admission to society at New Salem. "They first bantered the gentleman to run a foot race, jump, pitch the mall, or wrestle; and if none of these propositions seemed agreeable to him, they would request to know what he would do in case another gentleman should pull his nose or squirt tobacco juice in his face. If he did not seem entirely decided in his views as to what should be done in such a contingency, perhaps he would be nailed in a hogshead and rolled down New Salem hill, perhaps his ideas would be brightened by a brief ducking in the Sangamon; or perhaps he would be scoffed, kicked and cuffed by a great number of persons in concert, until he reached the confines of the village, and then turned adrift as being unfit company for the people of that settlement." If the stranger consented to race or wrestle, it was arranged that there should be foul play, which would lead to a fight; a proper display of mettle in which was accepted as a proof of the "gentleman's" fitness for society. Abe escaped initiation, his length and strength of limb being apparently deemed satisfactory evidence of his social respectability. But Clary's Grove was at last brought down upon him by the indiscretion of his friend and admirer, Offutt, who was already beginning to run him for President, and whose vauntings of his powers made a trial of strength inevitable. A wrestling match was contrived between Lincoln and Jack Armstrong, and money, jackknives and whiskey were freely staked on the result. Neither combatant could throw the other, and Abe proposed to Jack to "quit." But Jack, goaded on by his partisans, resorted to a "foul," upon which Abe's righteous wrath blazed up, and taking the champion of Clary's Grove by the throat he "shook him like a child." A fight was impending, and Abe, his back planted against Offutt's store, was facing a circle of foes, when a mediator appeared. Jack Armstrong was so satisfied of the strength of Abe's arm, that he at once declared him the best fellow that ever came into the settlement, and the two thenceforth reigned conjointly over the roughs and bullies of New Salem. Abe seems always to have used his power humanely and to have done his best to substitute arbitration for war. A strange man coming into the settlement, on being beset as usual by Clary's Grove and insulted by Jack Armstrong, knocked the bully down with a stick. Jack being as strong as two of him was going to "whip him badly," when Abe interposed, "Well Jack, what did you say to the man?" Jack repeated his words. "And what would you do if you were in a strange place and you were called a d—d liar?" "Whip him, by —-." "Then that man has done to you no more than you have done to him." Jack acknowledged the golden rule and "treated" his intended victim. If there were ever dissensions between the two "Caesars" of Salem, it was because Jack "in the abundance of his animal spirits" was addicted to nailing people in barrels and rolling them down the hill, while Abe was always on the side of mercy.

Abe's popularity grew apace; his ambition grew with it; it is astonishing how readily and freely the plant sprouts upon that soil. He was at this time carrying on his education evidently with a view to public life. Books were not easily found. He wanted to study English Grammar, considering that accomplishment desirable for a statesman; and, being told that there was a grammar in a house six miles from Salem, he left his breakfast at once and walked off to borrow it. He would slip away into the woods and spend hours in study and thinking. He sat up late at night, and as light was expensive, made a blaze of shavings in the cooper's shop. He waylaid every visitor to New Salem who had any pretence to scholarship, and extracted explanations of things which he did not understand. It does not appear that the work of Adam Smith, or any work upon political economy, currency, or any financial subject fell into the hands of the student who was destined to conduct the most tremendous operations in the whole history of finance.

The next episode in Lincoln's life which may be regarded as a part of his training was the command of a company of militia in the "Black Hawk" war. Black Hawk was an Indian Chief of great craft and power, and, apparently, of fine character, who had the effrontery to object to being improved off the face of creation, an offence which he aggravated by an hereditary attachment to the British. At a muster of the Sangamon company at Clary's Grove, Lincoln was elected captain. The election was a proof of his popularity, but he found it rather hard to manage his constituents in the field. One morning on the march the Captain commanded his orderly to form the company for parade; but when the orderly called "parade," the men called "parade" too, but could not fall into line. They had found their way to the officers' liquor the evening before. The regiment had to march and leave the company behind. About ten o'clock the company set out to follow; but when it had marched two miles "the drunken ones lay down and slept their drink off." Lincoln, who seems to have been perfectly blameless, was placed under arrest and condemned to carry a wooden sword; but it does not appear that any notice was taken of the conduct of that portion of the sovereign people which lay down drunk on the march when the army was advancing against the enemy. Something like this was probably the state of things in the Northern army at the beginning of the civil war, before discipline had been enforced by disaster. The campaign opened with a cleverly-won victory on the part of Black Hawk, and a rapid retrograde movement on the part of the militia, as to which we will be content to say with Mr. Lamon, "of drunkenness no public account makes any mention, and individual cowardice is never to be imputed to American troops." Ultimately, however, Black Hawk was overpowered and most of his men met their doom in attempting to retreat across the Mississippi. "During this short Indian campaign," says one who took part in it, "we had some hard times, often hungry; but we had a great deal of sport, especially at nights—foot racing, some horse racing, jumping, telling anecdotes, in which Lincoln beat all, keeping up a constant laughter and good humour all the time, among the soldiers some card-playing and wrestling in which Lincoln took a prominent part. I think it safe to say he was never thrown in a wrestle. While in the army he kept a handkerchief tied around him all the time for wrestling purposes, and loved the sport as well as any one could. He was seldom if ever beat jumping. During the campaign Lincoln himself was always ready for an emergency. He endured hardships like a good soldier; he never complained, nor did he fear dangers. When fighting was expected or danger apprehended, Lincoln was the first to say 'Let's go.' He had the confidence of every man of his company, and they strictly obeyed his orders at a word. His company was all young men, and full of sport." The assertion as to the strict and uniform obedience of the company at its captain's word, requires, as we have seen, some qualification in a democratic sense. Whether Lincoln was ever beaten in wrestling is also one of the moot points of history.

In the course of this campaign one Mr. Thompson, whose fame as a wrestler was great throughout the west, accepted Lincoln's challenge. Great excitement prevailed, and Lincoln's company and backers "put up all their portable property and some perhaps not their own, including knives, blankets, tomahawks, and all the necessary articles of a soldier's outfit." As soon as Lincoln laid hold of his antagonist he found that he had got at least his match, and warned his friends of that unwelcome fact. He was thrown once fairly, and a second time fell with Thompson on the top of him. "We were taken by surprise," candidly says Mr. Green, "and being unwilling to put with our property and lose our bets, got up an excuse as to the result. We declared the fall a kind of a dog-fall—did so apparently angrily." A fight was about to begin, when Lincoln rose up and said, "Boys, the man actually threw me once fair, broadly so; and the second time, this very fall, he threw me fairly, though not so apparently so." This quelled the disturbance.

On the same authority we are told that Lincoln gallantly interfered to save the life of a poor old Indian who had thrown himself on the mercy of the soldiers, and whom, notwithstanding that he had a pass, they were proceeding to slay. The anecdote wears a somewhat melodramatic aspect; but there is no doubt of Lincoln's humanity, or of his readiness to protest against oppression and cruelty when they actually fell under his notice. It was also in keeping with his character to insist firmly on the right of his militiamen to the same rations and pay as the regulars, and to draw the legal line sharply and clearly when the regular officers exceeded their authority in the exercise of command.

Returning to New Salem, Lincoln, having served his apprenticeship as a clerk, commenced storekeeping on his own account. An opening was made for him by the departure of Mr. Radford, the keeper of a grocery, who, having offended the Clary's Grove boys, they "selected a convenient night for breaking in his windows and gutting his establishment." From his ruins rose the firm of Lincoln & Berry. Doubt rests on the great historic question whether Lincoln sold liquor in his store, and on that question still more agonizing to a sensitive morality—whether he sold it by the dram. The points remain, we are told, and will forever remain undetermined. The only fact in which history can repose with certainty is that some liquor must have been given away, since nobody in the neighbourhood of Clary's Grove could keep store without offering the customary dram to the patrons of the place. When taxed on the platform by his rival, Douglas, with having sold liquor, Mr. Lincoln replied that if he figured on one side of the counter, Douglas figured on the other. "As a storekeeper," says Mr. Ellis, "Mr. Lincoln wore flax and tow linen pantaloons—I thought about five inches too short in the legs—and frequently he had but one suspender, no vest or coat. He had a calico shirt such as he had in the Black Hawk War; coarse brogues, tan-colour; blue yarn socks, a straw hat, old style, and without a band." It is recorded that he preferred dealing with men and boys, and disliked to wait on the ladies. Possibly, if his attire has been rightly described, the ladies, even the Clary's Grove ladies, may have reciprocated the feeling.

In storekeeping, however, Mr. Lincoln did not prosper; neither storekeeping nor any other regular business or occupation was congenial to his character. He was born to be a politician. Accordingly he began to read law, with which he combined surveying, at which we are assured he made himself "expert" by a six weeks' course of study. They mix trades a little in the West. We expected on turning the page to find that Mr. Lincoln had also taken up surgery and performed the Caesarean operation. The few law books needed for Western practice were supplied to him by a kind friend at Springfield, and according to a witness who has evidently an accurate memory for details, "he went to read law in 1832 or 1833 barefooted, seated in the shade of a tree and would grind around with the shade, just opposite Berry's grocery store, a few feet south of the door, occasionally lying flat on his back and putting his feet up the tree." Evidently, whatever he read, especially of a practical kind, he made thoroughly his own. It is needless to say that he did not become a master of scientific jurisprudence, but it seems that he did become an effective Western advocate. What is more, there is conclusive testimony to the fact that he was—what has been scandalously alleged to be rare, even in the United States—an honest lawyer. "Love of justice and fair play," says one of his brothers of the bar, "was his predominant trait. I have often listened to him when I thought he would state his case out of Court. It was not in his nature to assume or attempt to bolster up a false position. He would abandon his case first. He did so in the case of Buckmaster for the use of Durham v. Beener & Arthur, in our Supreme Court, in which I happened to be opposed to him. Another gentleman, less fastidious, took Mr. Lincoln's place and gained the case." His power as an advocate seems to have depended on his conviction that the right was on his side. "Tell Harris it's no use to waste money on me; in that case, he'll get beat." In a larceny case he took those who were counsel with him for the defence aside and said, "If you can say anything for the man do it. I can't. If I attempt it, the jury will see that I think he is guilty and convict him of course." In another case he proved an account for his client, who, though he did not know it, was a rogue. The counsel on the other side proved a receipt. By the time he had done Lincoln was missing; and on the Court sending for him, he replied, "Tell the judge I can't come; my hands are dirty, and I came over to clean them." Mr. Herndon, who visited Lincoln's office on business, gives the following reminiscence: —"Mr. Lincoln was seated at his table, listening very attentively to a man who was talking earnestly in a low tone. After the would-be client had stated the facts of the case, Mr. Lincoln replied, 'yes, there is no reasonable doubt but that I can gain your case for you. I can set a whole neighbourhood at logger heads; I can distress a widowed mother and her six fatherless children, and thereby get for you six hundred dollars, which rightly belongs, it appears to me, as much to the woman and her children as it does to you. You must remember that some things that are legally right are not morally right. I shall not take your case but will give you a bit of advice, for which I will charge you nothing. You seem to be a sprightly, energetic man. I would advise you to try your hand at making six hundred dollars in some other way.'" On one occasion, however, Lincoln, we believe it must be admitted, resorted to sharp practice. William Armstrong, the son of Jack Armstrong, of Clary's Grove, inheriting, as it seems, the "abundant animal spirits" of his father, committed, as was universally believed, a very brutal murder at a camp meeting, and being brought to trial was in imminent peril of the halter. Lincoln volunteered to defend him. The witness whose testimony bore hardest on the prisoner swore that he saw the murder committed by the light of the moon. Lincoln put in an almanac, which, on reference being made to it showed that at the time stated by the witness there was no moon. This broke down the witness and the prisoner was acquitted. It was not observed at the moment that the almanac was one of the year previous to the murder; and therefore morally a fabrication. Herculean efforts are made to prove that two almanacs were produced and that Mr. Lincoln was innocent of any deception. But the best plea, we conceive, is, that Mr. Lincoln had rocked William Armstrong in the cradle.

There is one part of Lincoln's early life which, though scandal may batten on it, we shall pass over lightly, we mean that part which relates to his love affairs and his marriage. Criticism, and even biography, should respect as far as possible the sanctuary of affection. That a man has dedicated his life to the service of the public is no reason why the public should be licensed to amuse itself by playing with his heart-strings. Not only as a storekeeper, but in every capacity, Mr. Lincoln was far more happy in his relations with men than with women. He however loved, and loved deeply, Ann Rutledge, who appears to have been entirely worthy of his attachment, and whose death at the moment when she would have felt herself at liberty to marry him threw him into a transport of grief, which threatened his reason and excited the gravest apprehensions of his friends. In stormy weather especially he would rave piteously, crying that "he could never be reconciled to have the snow, rains and storms to beat upon her grave." This first love he seems never to have forgotten. He next had an affair, not so creditable to him, with a Miss Owens, of whom, after their rupture, he wrote things which he had better have left unwritten. Finally, he made a match of which the world has heard more than enough, though the Western Boy was too true a gentleman to let it hear anything about the matter from his lips. It is enough to say that this man was not wanting in that not inconsiderable element of worth, even of the worth of statesmen, strong and pure affection.

"If ever," said Abraham Lincoln, "American society and the United States Government are demoralized and overthrown, it will come from the voracious desire of office—this wriggle to live without toil, from which I am not free myself." These words ought to be written up in the largest characters in every schoolroom in the United States. The confession with which they conclude is as true as the rest. Mr. Lincoln, we are told, took no part in the promotion of local enterprises, railroads, schools, churches, asylums. The benefits he proposed for his fellow men were to be accomplished by political means alone "Politics were his world—a world filled with hopeful enchantments. Ordinarily he disliked to discuss any other subject." "In the office," says his partner, Mr. Herndon, "he sat down or spilt himself (sic) on his lounge, read aloud, told stories, talked politics—never science, art, literature, railroad gatherings, colleges, asylums, hospitals, commerce, education, progress—nothing that interested the world generally, except politics." "He seldom," says his present biographer, "took an active part in local or minor elections, or wasted his power to advance a friend. He did nothing out of mere gratitude, and forgot the devotion of his warmest partisans, as soon as the occasion for their services had passed. What they did for him was quietly appropriated as the reward of superior merit, calling for no return in kind." We are told that while he was "wriggling," he was in effect boarded and clothed for some years by his friend, Hon. W. Butler, at Springfield, and that, when in power, he refused to exercise his patronage in favour of his friend. On that occasion, his biographer tells us, that he considered his patronage a solemn trust. We give him credit for a conscientiousness above the ordinary level of his species on this as well as on other subjects. But his sense of the solemn character of his trust, though it prevented him from giving a petty place to the old friend who had helped him in the day of his need, did not prevent him, as President, from sometimes paying for support by a far more questionable use of the highest patronage in his gift.

The fact is not that the man was by nature wanting in gratitude or in any kindly quality, on the contrary, he seems to have abounded in them all. But the excitement of the game was so intense that it swallowed up all other considerations and emotions. In a dead season of politics, his depression was extreme. "He said gloomily, despairingly, sadly, 'How hard, oh! how hard it is to die and leave one's country no better than if one had never lived for it. This world is dead to hope, deaf to its own death-struggle.'" Possibly this is the way in which "wriggling" politicians generally put the case to themselves.

Lincoln's fundamental principle was devotion to the popular will. In his address to the people of Sangamon County, he says, "while acting as their representative I shall be governed by their will on all subjects upon which I have the means of knowing what their will is, and upon all others I will do what my own judgment teaches me will advance their interests." "'It is a maxim,' with many politicians, just to keep along even with the humour of the people right or wrong." "This maxim," adds the biographer, "Mr. Lincoln held then, as ever since, in very high estimation." It may occur to some enquiring minds to ask what, upon those principles, is the use of having representation at all, and whether it would not be better to let the people themselves vote directly on all questions without interposing a representative to diminish their sense of responsibility, to say nothing of the sacrifice of the representative's conscience, which, in the cases of the statesmen here described, was probably not very great. With regard to Slavery, however, Mr. Lincoln showed forecast, if not conscientious independence. He stepped forth in advance of the sentiments of his party, and to his political friends appeared rash in the extreme.

Lincoln's first attempt to get elected to the State Legislature was unsuccessful. It however brought him the means of "doing something for his country," and partly averting the "death-struggle of the world," in the shape of the postmastership of New Salem. The business of the office was not on a large scale, for it was carried on in Mr. Lincoln's hat—an integument of which it is recorded, that he refused to give it to a conjurer to play the egg trick in, "not from respect for his own hat, but for the conjurer's eggs." The future President did not fail to signalize his first appearance as an administrator by a sally of the jocularity which was always struggling with melancholy in his mind. A gentleman of the place, whose education had been defective, was in the habit of calling two or three times a day at the post-office, and ostentatiously inquiring for letters. At last he received a letter, which, being unable to read himself, he got the postmaster to read for him before a large circle of friends. It proved to be from a negro lady engaged in domestic service in the South, recalling the memory of a mutual attachment, with a number of incidents more delectable than sublime. It is needless to say that the postmaster, by a slight extension of the sphere of his office, had written the letter as well as delivered it.

In a second candidature the aspirant was more successful, and he became one of nine representatives of Sangamon County, in the State Legislature of Illinois, who, being all more than six feet high, were called "The Long Nine." With his Brobdingnagian colleagues Abraham plunged at once into the "internal improvement system," and distinguished himself above his fellows by the unscrupulous energy and strategy with which he urged through the Legislature a series of bubble schemes and jobs. Railroads and other improvements, especially improvements of river navigation, were voted out of all proportion to the means or credit of the then thinly-peopled State. To set these little matters in motion, a loan of eight millions of dollars was authorized, and to complete the canal from Chicago to Peru, another loan of four millions of dollars was voted at the same session, two hundred thousand dollars being given as a gratuity to those counties which seemed to have no special interest in any of the foregoing projects. Work on all these roads was to commence, not only at the same time, but at both ends of each road and at all the river- crossings. There were as yet no surveys of any route, no estimates, no reports of engineers, or even unprofessional viewers. "Progress was not to wait on trifles; capitalists were supposed to be lying in wait to catch these precious bonds; the money would be raised in a twinkling, and being applied with all the skill of a hundred De Witt Clintons—a class of gentlemen at that time extremely numerous and obtrusive—the loan would build railroads, the railroads would build cities, cities would create farms, foreign capital would rush in to so inviting a field, the lands would be taken up with marvellous celerity, and the land tax going into a sinking fund, that, with some tolls and certain sly speculations to be made by the State, would pay principal and interest of debt without even a cent of taxation upon the people. In short, everybody was to be enriched, while the munificence of the State in selling its credit and spending the proceeds, would make its empty coffers overflow with ready money. It was a dark stroke of statesmanship, a mysterious device in finance, which, whether from being misunderstood or mismanaged, bore from the beginning fruits the very reverse of those it had promised." We seem here to be reading the history of more than one great railway enterprise undertaken by politicians without the red tape preliminaries of surveying or framing estimates, progress not deigning to wait upon trifles. This system of policy gave fine scope for the talents of the "log-roller," here defined as an especially wily and persuasive person, who could depict the merits of his scheme with roseate but delusive eloquence, and who was said to carry a gourd of "possum fat"—wherewith he "greased and swallowed" his prey. One of the largest of these gourds was carried by "honest Abe," who was especially active in "log-rolling" a bill for the removal of the seat of government from Vandalia to Springfield, at a virtual cost to the State of about six millions of dollars, which we were told would have purchased all the real estate in the town three times over. "Thus by log-rolling on the loud measure, by multiplying railroads, by terminating these roads at Alton, that Alton might become a great city in opposition to St. Louis; by distributing money to some of the counties to be wasted by the County Commissioners, and by giving the seat of government to Springfield—was the whole State bought up and bribed to approve the most senseless and disastrous policy which ever crippled the energies of a young country." We are told, and do not doubt, that Mr. Lincoln shared the popular delusion; but we are also told, and are equally sure, that "even if he had been unhappily afflicted with individual scruples of his own he would have deemed it but simple duty to obey the almost unanimous voice of his constituency." In other words, he would have deemed it his duty to pander to the popular madness by taking a part in financial swindling. Yet he and his principal confederates obtained afterwards high places of honour and trust. A historian of Illinois calls them "spared monuments of popular wrath, evincing how safe it is to be a politician, but how disastrous it may be to the country to keep along with the present fervour of the people." It is instructive as well as just to remember that all this time the man was strictly, nay sensitively, honourable in his private dealings, that he was regarded by his fellows as a paragon of probity, that his word was never questioned, that of personal corruption calumny itself, so far as we are aware, never dared to accuse him. Politics, it seems, may be a game apart, with rules of its own which supersede morality.

Considering that, as we said before, this man was destined to preside over the most tremendous operations in the whole history of finance, it is especially instructive to see what was the state of his mind on economical subjects. He actually proposed to pass a usury law, having arrived, it appears, at the sage conviction that while to pay the current rent for the use of a house or the current fee for the services of a lawyer is perfectly proper, to pay the current price for money is to "allow a few individuals to levy a direct tax on the community." But this is an ordinary illusion. Abraham Lincoln's illusions went far beyond it. He actually proposed so to legislate that in cases of extreme necessity there might "always be found means to cheat the law, while in all other cases it would have its intended effect." He proposed in fact absurdity qualified by fraud, the established practice of which would, no doubt, have had a most excellent effect in teaching the citizens to reverence and the Courts to uphold the law. As President, when told that the finances were low, he asked whether the printing machine had given out, and he suggested, as a special temptation to capitalists, the issue of a class of bonds which should be exempt from seizure for debt. It may safely be said that the burden of the United States debt was ultimately increased fifty per cent through sheer ignorance of the simplest principles of economy and finance on the part of those by whom it was contracted.

Lincoln's style, both as a speaker and a writer, ultimately became plain, terse, and with occasional faults of taste, caused by imperfect education, pure as well as effective. His Gettysburg address and some of his State Papers are admirable in their way. Saving one very flat expression, the address has no superior in literature. But it was impossible that the oratory of a rising politician, especially in the West, should be free from spread-eagleism. Scattered through these pages we find such gems as the following:—

"All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not, by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years!" ... "Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the every-day news of the times. They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana; they are neither peculiar to the eternal (?) snows of the former, nor to the burning sun of the latter." ... "That we improve to the last, that we revered his name to the last, that during his long sleep we permitted no hostile foot to pass or desecrate his resting-place, shall be that which to learn the last trump shall awaken our Washington." Washington's mind, when he rises from his grave at the Last Day, will be immediately relieved by the information that no Britisher has ever trodden on his bones.

In debate he was neither bitter nor personal in the bad sense, though he had a good deal of caustic humour and knew how to make an effective use of it.

Passing from State politics to those of the Union, and elected to Congress as a Whig, a party to which he had gradually found his way from his original position as a "nominal Jackson man," Mr. Lincoln stood forth in vigorous though discreet and temperate opposition to the Mexican War.

Some extra charges made by General Cass upon the Treasury for expenses in a public mission, afforded an opportunity for a hit at the great Democratic "war-horse." "I have introduced," said Lincoln, "General Cass's name here chiefly to show the wonderful physical capacity of the man. They show that he not only did the labour of several men at the same time, but that he often did it at several places, many hundred miles apart at the same time. And in eating, too, his capacities are shown to be quite as wonderful. From October, 1821, to May, 1822, he ate ten rations a day in Michigan, ten rations a day here in Washington, and nearly five dollars' worth a day besides, partly on the road between the two places. And then there is an important discovery in his example, the art of being paid for what one eats, instead of having to pay for it. Hereafter if any nice young man should owe a bill which he cannot pay in any other way, he can just board it out. Mr. Speaker, we have all heard of the animal standing in doubt between two stacks of hay, and starving to death. The like of that could never happen to General Cass. Place the stacks a thousand miles apart, he would stand stock still midway between them, and eat them both at once; and the green grass along the line would be apt to suffer some at the same time. By all means make him President, gentlemen. He will feed you bounteously, if—if there is any left after he has helped himself."

Great events were by this time beginning to loom on the political horizon. The Missouri Compromise was broken. Parties commenced slowly but surely to divide themselves into Pro-slavery and Anti-slavery. The "irrepressible conflict" was coming on, though none of the American politicians—not even the author of that famous phrase—distinctly recognised its advent. Lincoln seems to have been sincerely opposed to slavery, though he was not an Abolitionist. But he was evidently led more and more to take anti-slavery ground by his antagonism to Douglas, who occupied a middle position, and tried to gain at once the support of the South and that of the waverers at the North, by theoretically supporting the extension of slavery, yet practically excluding it from the territories by the doctrine of squatters' sovereignty. Lincoln had to be very wary in angling for the vote of the Abolitionists, who had recently been the objects of universal obloquy, and were still offensive to a large section of the Republican party. On one occasion, the opinions which he propounded by no means suited the Abolitionists, and "they required him to change them forthwith. He thought it would be wise to do so considering the peculiar circumstances of his case; but, before committing himself finally, he sought an understanding with Judge Logan. He told the judge what he was disposed to do, and said he would act upon the inclination if the judge would not regard it as treading on his toes. The judge said he was opposed to the doctrine proposed, but for the sake of the cause on hand he would cheerfully risk his toes. And so the Abolitionists were accommodated. Mr. Lincoln quietly made the pledge, and they voted for him." He came out, however, square enough, and in the very nick of time with his "house divided against itself" speech, which took the wind out of the sails of Seward with his "irrepressible conflict." Douglas, whom Lincoln regarded with intense personal rivalry, was tripped up by a string of astute interrogations, the answers to which hopelessly embroiled him with the South. Lincoln's campaign against Douglas for the Senatorship greatly and deservedly enhanced his reputation as a debater, and he became marked out as the Western candidate for the Republican nomination to the Presidency. A committee favourable to his claims sent to him to make a speech at New York. He arrived "in a sleek and shining suit of new black, covered with very apparent creases and wrinkles acquired by being packed too closely and too long in his little valise." Some of his supporters must have moralized on the strange apparition which their summons had raised. His speech, however, made before an immense audience at the Cooper Institute, was most successful. And as a display of constitutional logic it is a very good speech. It fails, as the speeches of these practical men one and all did fail, their "common sense" and "shrewdness" notwithstanding, in clear perception of the great facts that two totally different systems of society had been formed, one in the Slave States and the other in the Free, and that political institutions necessarily conform themselves to the social character of the people. Whether the Civil War could, by any men or means, have been arrested, it would be hard to say; but assuredly stump orators, even the very best of them, were not the men to avert it. At that great crisis no saviour appeared. On May 10th, in the eventful year 1860, the Republican State Convention of Illinois, by acclamation, and amidst great enthusiasm, nominated Lincoln for the Presidency. One who saw him receive the nomination says, "I then thought him one of the most diffident and most plagued of men I ever saw." We may depend upon it, however, that his diffidence of manner was accompanied by no reluctance of heart. The splendid prize which he had won had been the object of his passionate desire. In the midst of the proceedings the door of the wigwam opened, and Lincoln's kinsman, John Hanks, entered, with "two small triangular 'heart-rails,' surmounted by a banner with the inscription, 'Two rails from a lot made by Abraham Lincoln and John Hanks in the Sangamon bottom, in the year 1830'." The bearer of the rails, we are told, was met "with wild and tumultuous cheers," and "the whole scene was simply tempestuous and bewildering."

The Democrats, of course, did not share the delight. An old man, out of Egypt, (the southern end of Illinois) came up to Mr. Lincoln, and said. "So you're Abe Lincoln?" "That's my name, sir." "They say you're a self- made man." "Well, yes what there is of me is self-made." "Well, all I have got to say," observed the old Egyptian, after a careful survey of the statesman, "is, that it was a d—n bad job." This seems to be the germ of the smart reply to the remark that Andrew Johnson was a self- made man, "that relieves the Almighty of a very heavy responsibility."

The nomination of the State Convention of Illinois was accepted after a very close and exciting contest between Lincoln and Seward by the convention of the Republican party assembled at Chicago. The proceedings seem to have been disgraceful. A large delegation of roughs, we are told, headed by Tom Shyer, the pugilist, attended for Seward. The Lincoln party, on the other side, spent the whole night in mustering their "loose fellows," and at daylight the next morning packed the wigwam, so that the Seward men were unable to get in.

Another politician was there nominally as a candidate, but really only to sell himself for a seat in the Cabinet. When he claimed the fulfilment of the bond, Lincoln's conscience, or at least his regard for his own reputation, struggled hard. "All that I am in the world—the Presidency and all else—I owe to that opinion of me which the people express when they call me 'honest old Abe.' Now, what will they think of their honest Abe when he appoints this man to be his familiar adviser?" What they might have said with truth was that Abe was still honest but politics were not.

Widely different was the training undergone for the leadership of the people by the Pericles of the American Republic from that undergone by the Pericles of Athens, or by any group of statesmen before him, Greek, Roman, or European. In this point of view, Mr. Lamon's book is a most valuable addition to the library of political science. The advantages and the disadvantages of Lincoln's political education are manifest at a glance. He was sure to produce something strong, genuine, practical, and entirely in unison with the thoughts and feelings of a people which, like the Athenians in the days of Pericles, was to be led, not governed. On the other hand, it necessarily left the statesman without the special knowledge necessary for certain portions of his work, such as finance, which was detestably managed during Lincoln's Presidency, without the wisdom which flows from a knowledge of the political world and of the past, without elevation, and comprehensiveness of view. It was fortunate for Lincoln that the questions with which he had to deal, and with which his country and the world proclaim him to have dealt, on the whole, admirably well, though not in their magnitude and importance, were completely within his ken, and had been always present to his mind. Reconstruction would have made a heavier demand on the political science of Clary's Grove. But that task was reserved for other hands.



ALFREDUS REX FUNDATOR

A few weeks ago an Oxford College celebrated the thousandth anniversary of its foundation by King Alfred. [Footnote: We keep the common spelling, though AElfred is more correct. It is impossible, in deference to antiquarian preciseness, to change the spelling of all these names, which are now imbedded in the English classics.]

The college which claims this honour is commonly called University College, though its legal name is Magna Aula Universitatis. The name "University College" causes much perplexity to visitors. They are with difficulty taught by the friend who is lionizing them to distinguish it from the University. But the University of Oxford is a federation of colleges, of which University College is one, resembling in all respects the rest of the sisterhood, being, like them, under the federal authority of the University, retaining the same measure of college right, conducting the domestic instruction and discipline of its students through its own officers, but sending them to the lecture rooms of the University Professors for the higher teaching, and to the University examination rooms to be examined for their degrees. The college is an ample and venerable pile, with two towered gateways, each opening into a quadrangle, its front stretching along the High Street, on the side opposite St. Mary's Church. The darkness of the stone seems to bespeak immemorial antiquity, but the style, which is the later Gothic characteristic of Oxford, and symbolical of its history, shows that the buildings really belong to the time of the Stuarts. "That building must be very old, Sir," said an American visitor to the master of the college, pointing to its dark front. "Oh, no," was the master's reply, "the colour deceives you; that building is not more than two hundred years old." In invidious contrast to this mass, debased but imposing in its style, the pedantic mania for pure Gothic which marks the Neo-catholic reaction in Oxford, and which will perhaps hereafter be derided as we deride the classic mania of the last century, has led Mr. Gilbert Scott to erect a pure Gothic library. This building, moreover, has nothing in its form to bespeak its purpose, but resembles a chapel. Over the gateway of the larger quadrangle is a statue, in Roman costume, of James II.; one of the few memorials of the ejected tyrant, who in his career of reaction visited the college and had two rooms on the east side of the quadrangle fitted up for the performance of mass. Obadiah Walker, the master of the college, had turned Papist, and became one of the leaders of the reaction, in the overthrow of which he was involved, the fall of his master and the ruin of his party being announced to him by the boys singing at his window—"Ave Maria, old Obadiah." In the same quadrangle are the chambers of Shelley, and the room to which he was summoned by the assembled college authorities to receive, with his friend Hogg, sentence of expulsion for having circulated an atheistical treatise. In the ante-chapel is the florid monument of Sir William Jones. But the modern divinities of the college are the two great legal brothers, Lord Eldon and Lord Stowell, whose colossal statues fraternally united are conspicuous in the library, whose portraits hang side by side in the hall, whose medallion busts greet you at the entrance to the Common Room. Pass by these medallions, and look into the Common Room itself, with panelled walls, red curtains, polished mahogany table, and generally cozy aspect, whither after the dinner in hall the fellows of the college retire to sip their wine and taste such social happiness as the rule of celibacy permits. Over that ample fire-place, round the blaze of which the circle is drawn in the winter evenings, you will see the marble bust, carved by no mean hand, of an ancient king, and underneath it are the words Alfredus Rex Fundator.

Alas! both traditions—the tradition that Alfred founded the University of Oxford, and the tradition that he founded University College—are devoid of historical foundation. Universities did not exist in Alfred's days. They were developed centuries later out of the monastery schools. When Queen Elizabeth was on a visit to Cambridge, a scholar delivered before her an oration, in which he exalted the antiquity of his own university at the expense of that of the University of Oxford. The University of Oxford was roused to arms. In that uncritical age any antiquarian weapon which the fury of academical patriotism could supply was eagerly grasped, and the reputation of the great antiquary Camden is somewhat compromised with regard to an interpolation in Asser's Life of Alfred, which formed the chief documentary support of the Oxford case. The historic existence of both the English universities dawns in the reign of the scholar king, and the restorer of order and prosperity after the ravages of the conquest and the tyranny of Rufus—Henry I. In that reign the Abbot of Croyland, to gain money for the rebuilding of his abbey, set up a school where, we are told, Priscian's grammar, Aristotle's logic with the commentaries of Porphyry and Averroes, Cicero and Quintilian as masters of rhetoric, were taught after the manner of the school of Orleans. In the following reign a foreign professor, Vacarius, roused the jealousy of the English monarchy and baronage by teaching Roman law in the schools of Oxford. The thirteenth century, that marvellous and romantic age of mediaeval religion and character, mediaeval art, mediaeval philosophy, was also the palmy age of the universities. Then Oxford gloried in Groseteste, at once paragon and patron of learning, church reformer and champion of the national church against Roman aggression; in his learned and pious friend, Adam de Marisco; and in Roger Bacon, the pioneer and proto-martyr of physical science. Then, with Paris, she was the great seat of that school philosophy, wonderful in its subtlety as well as in its aridity, which, albeit it bore no fruit itself, trained the mind of Europe for more fruitful studies, and was the original product of mediaeval Christendom, though its forms of thought were taken from the deified Stagyrite, and it was clothed in the Latin language, though in a form of that language so much altered and debased from the classical as to become, in fact, a literary vernacular of the Middle Ages. Then her schools, her church porches, her very street corners, every spot where a professor could gather an audience, were thronged with the aspiring youth who had flocked, many of them begging their way out of the dark prison-house of feudalism, to what was then, in the absence of printing, the sole centre of intellectual light. Then Oxford, which in later times became from the clerical character of the headships and fellowships the great organ of reaction, was the great organ of progress, produced the political songs which embodied, with wonderful force, the principles of free government, and sent her students to fight under the banner of the university in the army of Simon de Montfort.

It was in the thirteenth century that University College was really founded. The founder was William of Durham, an English ecclesiastic who had studied in the University of Paris. The universities were, like the church, common to all the natives of Latin Christendom, that ecclesiastical and literary federation of the European States, which, afterwards broken up by the Reformation, is now in course of reconstruction through uniting influences of a new kind. William of Durham bequeathed to the University a fund for the maintenance of students in theology. The university purchased with the fund a house in which these students were maintained, and which was styled the Great Hall of the University, in contra-distinction to the multitude of little private halls or hospices in which students lived, generally under the superintendence of a graduate who was their teacher. The hall or college was under the visitorship of the University; but this visitorship being irksome, and a dispute having arisen in the early part of the last century whether it was to be exercised by the University at large, in convocation, or by the theological faculty only, the college set up a claim to be a royal foundation of the time of King Alfred, the reputed founder of the University, and thus exempt from any visitorship but that of the Crown. It was probably not very difficult to convince a Hanoverian court of law that the visitorship of an Oxford college ought to be transferred from the Jacobite university to the Crown; and so it came to pass that the Court of King's Bench solemnly ratified as a fact what historical criticism pronounces to be a baseless fable. The case in favour of William of Durham as the founder is so clear, that the antiquaries are ready to burst with righteous indignation, and one almost enjoys the intensity of their wrath.

The Great Hall of the University was not, when first founded, a perfect college. It was only a house for some eight or ten graduates in arts who were studying divinity. The first perfect college was founded by Walter de Merton, the Chancellor of Henry III., to whom is due the conception of uniting the anti-monastic pursuit of secular learning with monastic seclusion and discipline, for the benefit of that multitude of young students who had hitherto dwelt at large in the city under little or no control, and often showed, by their faction fights and other outrages, that they contained the quintessence of the nation's turbulence as well as of its intellectual activity and ambition. The quaint old quadrangle of Merton, called, nobody seems to know why, "Mob" Quad, may be regarded as the cradle of collegiate life in England, and indeed in Europe.

Still University College is the oldest foundation of learning now existing in England; and therefore it may be not inappropriately dedicated to the memory of the king who was the restorer of our intellectual life as well as the preserver of our religion and our institutions. Mr. Freeman, as the stern minister of fact, would, no doubt, cast down the bust of Alfred from the Common Room chimney-piece and set up that of William of Durham, if a likeness of him could be found, in its place. But it may be doubted whether William of Durham, if he were alive, would do the same.

Marcus Aurelius, Alfred and St. Louis, are the three examples of perfect virtue on a throne. But the virtue of St. Louis is deeply tainted with asceticism; and with the sublimated selfishness on which asceticism is founded, he sacrifices everything and everybody—sacrifices national interests, sacrifices the lives of the thousands of his subjects whom he drags with him in his chimerical crusades—to the good of his own soul. The Reflections of Marcus Aurelius will be read with ever increasing admiration by all who have learned to study character, and to read it in its connection with history. Alone in every sense, without guidance or support but that which he found in his own breast, the imperial Stoic struggled serenely, though hopelessly, against the powers of evil which were dragging heathen Rome to her inevitable doom. Alfred was a Christian hero, and in his Christianity he found the force which bore him, through calamity apparently hopeless, to victory and happiness.

It must be owned that the materials for the history of the English king are not very good. His biography by Bishop Asser, his counsellor and friend, which forms the principal authority, is panegyrical and uncritical, not to mention that a doubt rests on the authenticity of some portions of it. But in the general picture there are a consistency and a sobriety, which, combined with its peculiarity, commend it to us as historical. The leading acts of Alfred's life are, of course, beyond doubt. And as to his character, he speaks to us himself in his works, and the sentiments which he expresses perfectly correspond with the physiognomy of the portrait.

We have called him a Christian hero. He was the victorious champion of Christianity against Paganism. This is the real significance of the struggle and of his character. The Northmen, or, as we loosely term them, the Danes, are called by the Saxon chroniclers the Pagans. As to race, the Northman, like the Saxon, was a Teuton, and the institutions, and the political and social tendencies of both, were radically the same.

It has been said that Christianity enervated the English and gave them over into the hands of the fresh and robust sons of nature. Asceticism and the abuse of monachism enervated the English. Asceticism taught the spiritual selfishness which flies from the world and abandons it to ruin instead of serving God by serving humanity. Kings and chieftains, under the hypocritical pretence of exchanging a worldly for an angelic life, buried themselves in the indolence, not seldom in the sensuality, of the cloister, when they ought to have been leading their people against the Dane. But Christianity formed the bond which held the English together, and the strength of their resistance. It inspired their patriot martyrs, it raised up to them a deliverer at their utmost need. The causes of Danish success are manifest; superior prowess and valour, sustained by more constant practice in war, of which the Saxon had probably had comparatively little since the final subjection of the Celt and the union of the Saxon kingdoms under Egbert; the imperfect character of that union, each kingdom retaining its own council and its own interests; and above all the command of the sea, which made the invaders ubiquitous, while the march of the defenders was delayed, and their junction prevented, by the woods and morasses of the uncleared island, in which the only roads worthy of the name were those left by the Romans.

It would be wrong to call the Northmen mere corsairs, or even to class them with piratical states such as Cilicia of old, or Barbary in more recent times. Their invasions were rather to be regarded as an after-act of the great migration of the Germanic tribes, one of the last waves of the flood which overwhelmed the Roman Empire, and deposited the germs of modern Christendom. They were, and but for the defensive energy of the Christianized Teuton would have been, to the Saxon what the Saxon had been to the Celt, whose sole monuments in England now are the names of hills and rivers, the usual epitaph of exterminated races. Like the Saxons the Northmen came by sea, untouched by those Roman influences, political and religious, by which most of the barbarians had been more or less transmuted before their actual irruption into the Empire. If they treated all the rest of mankind as their prey, this was the international law of heathendom, modified only by a politic humanity in the case of the Imperial Roman, who preferred enduring dominion to blood and booty. With Christianity came the idea, even now imperfectly realized, of the brotherhood of man. The Northmen were a memorable race, and English character, especially its maritime element, received in them a momentous addition. In their northern abodes they had undergone, no doubt, the most rigorous process of national selection. The sea-roving life, to which they were driven by the poverty of their soil, as the Scandinavian of our day is driven to emigration, intensified in them the vigour, the enterprise, and the independence of the Teuton. As has been said before, they were the first ocean sailors; for the Phoenicians, though adventurous had crept along the shore; and the Greeks and Romans had done the same. The Northman, stouter of heart than they, put forth into mid Atlantic. American antiquarians are anxious to believe in a Norse discovery of America. Norse colonies were planted in Greenland beyond what is now the limit of human habitation; and when a power grew up in his native seats which could not be brooked by the Northman's love of freedom, he founded amidst the unearthly scenery of Iceland a community which brought the image of a republic of the Homeric type far down into historic times. His race, widely dispersed in its course of adventure, and everywhere asserting its ascendancy, sat on the thrones of Normandy, Apulia, Sicily, England, Ireland, and even Russia, and gave heroic chiefs to the crusaders. The pirates were not without heart towards each other, nor without a rudimentary civilization, which included on the one hand a strong regard for freehold property in land, and on the other a passionate love of heroic days. Their mythology was the universal story of the progress of the sun and the changes of the year, but in a northern version, wild with storms and icebergs, gloomy with the darkness of Scandinavian winters. Their religion was a war religion, the lord of their hearts a war god; their only heaven was that of the brave, their only hell that of the coward; and the joys of Paradise were a renewal of the fierce combat and the fierce carouse of earth. Some of them wound themselves up on the eve of battle to a frenzy like that of a Malay running amuck. But this was, at all events, a religion of action, not of ceremonial or spell; and it quelled the fear of death. In some legends of the Norse mythology there is a humorous element which shows freedom of spirit; while in others, such as the legend of the death of Balder, there is a pathos not uncongenial to Christianity. The Northmen were not priest-ridden. Their gods were not monstrous and overwhelming forces like the hundred-handed idols of the Hindu, but human forms, their own high qualities idealized, like the gods of the Greek, though with Scandinavian force in place of Hellenic grace.

Converted to Christianity, the Northman transferred his enthusiasm, his martial prowess and his spirit of adventure from the service of Odin to that of Christ, and became a devotee and a crusader. But in his unconverted state he was an exterminating enemy of Christianity; and Christianity was the civilization as well as the religion of England.

Scarcely had the Saxon kingdom been united by Egbert, when the barks of the Northmen appeared, filling the English Charlemagne, no doubt, with the same foreboding sorrow with which they had filled his Frankish prototype and master. In the course of the half century which followed, the swarms of rovers constantly increased, and grew more pertinacious and daring in their attacks. Leaving their ships they took horses, extended their incursions inland, and formed in the interior of the country strongholds, into which they brought the plunder of the district. At last they in effect conquered the North and Midland, and set up a satrap king, as the agent of their extortion. They seem, like the Franks of Clovis, to have quartered themselves as "guests" upon the unhappy people of the land. The monasteries and churches were the special objects of their attacks, both as the seats of the hated religion, and as the centres of wealth; and their sword never spared a monk. Croyland, Peterborough, Huntingdon and Ely, were turned to blood- stained ashes. Edmund, the Christian chief of East Anglia, found a martyrdom, of which one of the holiest and most magnificent of English abbeys was afterwards the monument. The brave Algar, another East Anglian chieftain, having taken the holy sacrament with all his followers on the eve of battle, perished with them in a desperate struggle, overcome by the vulpine cunning of the marauders. Among the leaders of the Northmen were the terrible brothers Ingrar and Ubba, fired, if the Norse legend may be trusted, by revenge as well as by the love of plunder and horror; for they were the sons of that Ragnar Lodbrok who had perished in the serpent tower of the Saxon Ella. When Alfred appeared upon the scene, Wessex itself, the heritage of the house of Cerdic and the supreme kingdom, was in peril from the Pagans, who had firmly entrenched themselves at Reading, in the angle between the Thames and Kennet, and English Christianity was threatened with destruction.

A younger but a favourite child, Alfred was sent in his infancy by his father to Rome to receive the Pope's blessing. He was thus affiliated, as it were, to that Roman element, ecclesiastical and political, which, combined with the Christian and Teutonic elements, has made up English civilization. But he remained through life a true Teuton. He went a second time, in company with his father, to Rome, still a child, yet old enough, especially if he was precocious, to receive some impressions from the city of historic grandeur, ancient art, ecclesiastical order, centralized power. There is a pretty legend, denoting the docility of the boy and his love of learning, or at least of the national lays; but he was also a hunter and a warrior. From his youth he had a thorn in his flesh, in the shape of a mysterious disease, perhaps epilepsy, to which monkish chroniclers have given an ascetic and miraculous turn; and this enhances our sense of the hero's moral energy in the case of Alfred, as in that of William III.

As "Crown Prince," to use the phrase of a German writer, Alfred took part with his elder brother, King Ethelbert, in the mortal struggle against the Pagans, then raging around Reading and along the rich valley through which the 'Great Western Railway' now runs, and where a Saxon victory is commemorated by the White Horse, which forms the subject of a little work by Thomas Hughes, a true representative, if any there be, of the liegemen and soldiers of King Alfred. When Ethelbert was showing that in him at all events Christianity was not free from the ascetic taint, by continuing to hear mass in his tent when the moment had come for decisive action, Alfred charged up-hill "like a wild boar" against the heathen, and began a battle which, his brother at last coming up, ended in a great victory. The death of Ethelbert, in the midst of the crisis, placed the perilous crown on Alfred's head. Ethelbert left infant sons, but the monarchy was elective, though one of the line of Cerdic was always chosen; and those were the days of the real king, the ruler judge, and captain of the people, not of what Napoleon called the cochon a l'engrais a cinq millions par an. In pitched battles, eight of which were fought in rapid succession, the English held their own; but they were worn out, and at length could no longer be brought into the field. Whether a faint monkish tradition of the estrangement of the people by unpopular courses on the part of the young king has any substance of truth we cannot say.

Utter gloom now settled down upon the Christian king and people. Had Alfred yielded to his inclinations, he would probably have followed the example of his brother-in-law, Buhred of Mercia, and sought a congenial retreat amidst the churches and libraries of Rome; asceticism would have afforded him a pretext for so doing; but he remained at the post of duty. Athelney, a little island in the marshes of Somersetshire—then marshes, now drained and a fruitful plain—to which he retired with the few followers left him, has been aptly compared to the mountains of Asturias, which formed the last asylum of Christianity in Spain. A jewel with the legend in Anglo-Saxon, "Alfred caused me to be made," was found near the spot, and is now in the University Museum at Oxford. A similar island in the marshes of Cambridgeshire formed the last rallying point of English patriotism against the Norman Conquest. Of course, after the deliverance, a halo of legends gathered around Athelney. The legends of the king disguised as a peasant in the cottage of the herdsman, and of the king disguised as a harper in the camp of the Dane, are familiar to childhood. There is also a legend of the miraculous appearance of the great Saxon Saint Cuthbert. The king in his extreme need had gone to fish in a neighbouring stream, but had caught nothing, and was trying to comfort himself by reading the Psalms, when a poor man came to the door and begged for a piece of bread. The king gave him half his last loaf and the little wine left in the pitcher. The beggar vanished; the loaf was unbroken, the pitcher brimful of wine; and fishermen came in bringing a rich haul of fish from the river. In the night St. Cuthbert appeared to the king in a dream and promised him victory. We see at least what notion the generations nearest to him had of the character of Alfred.

At last the heart of the oppressed people turned to its king, and the time arrived for a war of liberation. But on the morrow of victory Alfred compromised with the Northmen. He despaired, it seems, of their final expulsion, and thought it better, if possible, to make them Englishmen and Christians, and, to convert them into a barrier against their foreign and heathen brethren. We see in this politic moderation at once a trait of national character and a proof that the exploits of Alfred are not mythical. By the treaty of Wedmore, the northeastern part of England became the portion of the Dane, where he was to dwell in peace with the Saxon people, and in allegiance to their king, but under his own laws—an arrangement which had nothing strange in it when law was only the custom of the tribe. As a part of the compact, Guthorm led over his Northmen from the allegiance of Odin to that of Christ, and was himself baptized by the Christian name of Athelstan. When religions were national, or rather tribal, conversions were tribal too. The Northmen of East Anglia had not so far put off their heathen propensities or their savage perfidy as to remain perfectly true to their covenant: but, on the whole, Alfred's policy of compromise and assimilation was successful. A new section of heathen Teutonism was incorporated into Christendom, and England absorbed a large Norse population whose dwelling-place is still marked by the names of places, and perhaps in some measure by the features and character of the people. In the fishermen of Whitby, for example, a town with a Danish name, there is a peculiarity which is probably Scandinavian.

The transaction resembled the cession of Normandy to Rolf and his followers by the Carlovingian King of France. But the cession of Normandy marked the dissolution of the Carlovingian monarchy: from the cession of East Anglia to Guthorm dates a regeneration of the monarchy of Cerdic.

Alfred had rescued the country. But the country which he had rescued was a wreck. The Church, the great organ of civilization as well as of spiritual life, was ruined. The monasteries were in ashes. The monks of St. Cuthbert were wandering from place to place, with the relics of the great northern Saint. The worship of Woden seemed on the point of returning. The clergy had exchanged the missal and censer for the battle-axe, and had become secularized and brutalized by the conflict. The learning of the Order was dead. The Latin language, the tongue of the Church, of literature, of education, was almost extinct. Alfred himself says that he could not recollect a priest, south of the Thames, who understood the Latin service or could translate a document from the Latin when he became king. Political institutions were in an equal state of disorganization. Spiritual, intellectual, civil life—everything was to be restored; and Alfred undertook to restore everything. No man in these days stands alone, or towers in unapproachable superiority above his fellows. Nor can any man now play all the parts. A division of labour has taken place in all spheres. The time when the missionaries at once converted and civilized the forefathers of European Christendom, when Charlemagne or Alfred was the master spirit in everything, has passed away, and with it the day of hero-worship, of rational hero- worship, has departed, at least for the European nations. The more backward races may still need, and have reason to venerate, a Peter the Great.

Alfred had to do everything almost with his own hands. He was himself the inventor of the candle-clock which measured his time, so unspeakably precious, and of the lantern of transparent horn which protected the candle-clock against the wind in the tent, or the lodging scarcely more impervious to the weather than a tent, which in those times sheltered the head of wandering royalty. Far and wide he sought for men, like a bee in quest of honey, to condense a somewhat prolix trope of his biographer. An embassy of bishops, priests and religious laymen, with great gifts, was sent to the Archbishop of Rheims, within whose diocese the famous Grimbald resided, to persuade him to allow Grimbald to come to England, and with difficulty the ambassadors prevailed, Alfred promising to treat Grimbald with distinguished honour during the rest of his life. It is touching to see what a price the king set upon a good and able man. "I was called," says Asser, "from the western extremity of Wales. I was led to Sussex, and first saw the king in the royal mansion of Dene. He received me with kindness, and amongst other conversation, earnestly besought me to devote myself to his service, and to become his companion. He begged me to give up my preferments beyond the Severn, promising to bestow on me still richer preferments in their place." Asser said that he was unwilling to quit, merely for worldly honour, the country in which he had been brought up and ordained. "At least," replied the king, "give me half your time. Pass six months of the year with me and the rest in Wales." Asser still hesitated. The king repeated his solicitations, and Asser promised to return within half a year; the time was fixed for his visit, and on the fourth day of their interview he left the king and went home.

In order to restore civilization, it was necessary above all things to reform the Church. "I have often thought," says Alfred, "what wise men there were once among the English people, both clergy and laymen, and what blessed times those were when the people were governed by kings who obeyed God and His gospels, and how they maintained peace, virtue and good order at home, and even extended them beyond their own country; how they prospered in battle as well as in wisdom, and how zealous the clergy were in teaching and learning, and in all their sacred duties; and how people came hither from foreign countries to seek for instruction, whereas now, when we desire it, we can only obtain it from abroad." It is clear that the king, unlike the literary devotees of Scandinavian paganism, looked upon Christianity as the root of the greatness, and even of the military force, of the nation.

In order to restore the Church again, it was necessary above all things to refound the monasteries. Afterwards—society having become settled, religion being established, and the Church herself having acquired fatal wealth—these brotherhoods sank into torpor and corruption; but while the Church was still a missionary in a spiritual and material wilderness, waging a death struggle with heathenism and barbarism, they were the indispensable engines of the holy war. The re-foundation of monasteries, therefore, was one of Alfred's first cares; and he did not fail, in token of his pious gratitude, to build at Athelney a house of God which was far holier than the memorial abbey afterwards built by the Norman Conqueror at Battle. The revival of monasticism among the English, however, was probably no easy task, for their domestic and somewhat material nature never was well suited to monastic life. The monastery schools, the germs, as has been already said, of our modern universities and colleges, were the King's main organs in restoring education; but he had also a school in his palace for the children of the nobility and the royal household. It was not only clerical education that he desired to promote. His wish was "that all the free-born youth of his people, who possessed the means, might persevere in learning so long as they had no other work to occupy them, until they could perfectly read the English scriptures; while such as desired to devote themselves to the service of the Church might be taught Latin." No doubt the wish was most imperfectly fulfilled, but still it was a noble wish. We are told the King himself was often present at the instruction of the children in the palace school. A pleasant calm after the storms of battle with the Dane!

Oxford (Ousen-ford, the ford of the Ouse) was already a royal city; and it may be conjectured that, amidst the general restoration of learning under Alfred, a school of some sort would be opened there. This is the only particle of historical foundation for the academic legend which gave rise to the recent celebration. Oxford was desolated by the Norman Conquest, and anything that remained of the educational institution of Alfred was in all probability swept away.

Another measure, indispensable to the civilizer as well as to the church reformer in those days, was to restore the intercourse with Rome, and through her with continental Christendom, which had been interrupted by the troubles. The Pope, upon Alfred's accession, had sent him gifts and a piece of the Holy Cross. Alfred sent embassies to the Pope, and made a voluntary annual offering, to obtain favourable treatment for his subjects at Rome. But, adopted child of Rome, and naturally attached to her as the centre of ecclesiastical order and its civilizing influences though he was, and much as he was surrounded by ecclesiastical friends and ministers, we trace in him no ultramontanism, no servile submission to priests. The English Church, so far as we can see, remains national, and the English King remains its head.

Not only with Latin but with Eastern Christendom, Alfred, if we may trust the contemporary Saxon chronicles, opened communication. As Charlemagne, in the spirit partly perhaps of piety, partly of ambition, had sent an embassy with proofs of his grandeur to the Caliph of Bagdad; as Louis XIV., in the spirit of mere ambition, delighted to receive an embassy from Siam; so Alfred, in a spirit of piety unmixed, sent ambassadors to the traditional Church of St. Thomas in India: and the ambassadors returned, we are told, with perfumes and precious stones as the memorials of their journey, which were long preserved in the churches. "This was the first intercourse," remarks Pauli, "that took place between England and Hindostan."

All nations are inclined to ascribe their primitive institutions to some national founder, a Lycurgus, a Theseus, a Romulus. It is not necessary now to prove that Alfred did not found trial by jury, or the frank- pledge, or that he was not the first who divided the kingdom into shires, hundreds, or tithings. The part of trial by jury which has been politically of so much importance, its popular character, as opposed to arbitrary trial by a royal or imperial officer—that of which the preservation, amidst the general prevalence of judicial imperialism, has been the glory of England—was simply Teutonic; so was the frank-pledge, the rude machinery for preserving law and order by mutual responsibility in the days before police; so were the hundreds and the tithings, rudimentary institutions marking the transition from the clan to the local community or canton. The shires probably marked some stage in the consolidation of the Saxon settlements; at all events they were ancient divisions which Alfred can at most only have reconstituted in a revised form after the anarchy.

He seems, however, to have introduced a real and momentous innovation by appointing special judges to administer a more regular justice than that which was administered in the local courts of the earls and bishops, or even in the national assembly. In this respect he was the imitator, probably the unconscious imitator, of Charlemagne, and the precursor of Henry II., the institutor of our Justices in Eyre. The powers and functions of the legislature, the executive and the judiciary, lie at first enfolded in the same germ, and are alike exercised by the king, or, as in the case of the ancient republics, by the national assembly. It is a great step when the special office of the judiciary is separated from the rest. It is a great step also when uniformity of justice is introduced. Probably, however, these judges, like the itinerant justices of Henry II., were administrative as well as judicial officers; or, in the terms of our modern polity, they were delegates of the Home Office as well as of the Central Courts of Law.

In his laws, Alfred, with the sobriety and caution on which the statesmen of his race have prided themselves, renounces the character of an innovator, fearing, as he says, that his innovations might not be accepted by those who would come after him. His code, if so inartificial a document can be dignified with the name, is mainly a compilation from the laws of his Saxon predecessors. We trace, however, an advance from the barbarous system of weregeld, or composition for murder and other crimes as private wrongs, towards a State system of criminal justice. In totally forbidding composition for blood, and asserting that indefeasible sanctity of human life which is the essential basis of civilization, the code of Moses stands contrasted with other primaeval codes. Alfred, in fact, incorporated an unusually large amount of the Mosaic and Christian elements, which blend with Germanic customs and the relics of Roman law, in different proportions, to make up the various codes of the early Middle Ages, called the Laws of the Barbarians. His code opens with the Ten Commandments, followed by extracts from Exodus, containing the Mosaic law respecting the relations between masters and servants, murder and other crimes, and the observance of holy days, and the Apostolic Epistle from Acts xv 23-29. Then is added Matthew vii. 12, "Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." "By this one Commandment," says Alfred, "a man shall know whether he does right, and he will then require no other law-book." This is not the form of a modern Act of Parliament, but legislation in those days was as much preaching as enactment; it often resembled in character the Royal Proclamation against Vice and Immorality.

Alfred's laws unquestionably show a tendency to enforce loyalty to the king, and to enhance the guilt of treason, which, in the case of an attempt on the king's life, is punished with death and confiscation, instead of the old composition by payment of the royal weregeld. Hence he has been accused of imperializing and anti-Teutonic tendencies; he had even the misfortune to be fixed upon as a prototype by Oxford advocates of the absolutism of Charles I. There is no ground for the charge, so far at least as Alfred's legislation or any known measure of his government is concerned. The kingly power was the great source of order and justice amidst that anarchy, the sole rallying point and bond of union for the imperilled nation; to maintain it, and protect from violence the life of its holder, was the duty of a patriot law-giver: and as the authority of a Saxon king depended in great measure on his personal character and position, no doubt the personal authority of Alfred was exceptionally great. But he continued to govern by the advice of the national council; and the fundamental principles of the Teutonic polity remained unimpaired by him, and were transmitted intact to his successors. His writings breathe a sense of the responsibilities of rulers and a hatred of tyranny. He did not even attempt to carry further the incorporation of the subordinate kingdoms with Wessex; but ruled Mercia as a separate state by the hand of his brother-in-law, and left it to its own national council or witan. Considering his circumstances, and the chaos from which his government had emerged, it is wonderful that he did not centralize more. He was, we repeat, a true Teuton, and entirely worthy of his place in the Germanic Walhalla.

The most striking proof of his multifarious activity of mind, and of the unlimited extent of the task which his circumstances imposed upon him, as well as of his thoroughly English character, is his undertaking to give his people a literature in their own tongue. To do this he had first to educate himself—to educate himself at an advanced age, after a life of fierce distraction, and with the reorganization of his shattered kingdom on his hands. In his boyhood he had got by heart Saxon lays, vigorous and inspiring, but barbarous; he had learned to read, but it is thought that he had not learned to write. "As we were one day sitting in the royal chamber," says Asser, "and were conversing as was our wont, it chanced that I read him a passage out of a certain book. After he had listened with fixed attention, and expressed great delight, he showed me the little book which he always carried about with him, and in which the daily lessons, psalms and prayers, were written, and begged me to transcribe that passage into his book." Asser assented, but found that the book was already full, and proposed to the king to begin another book, which was soon in its turn filled with extracts. A portion of the process of Alfred's education is recorded by Asser. "I was honourably received at the royal mansion, and at that time stayed eight months in the king's court. I translated and read to him whatever books he wished which were within our reach; for it was his custom, day and night, amidst all his afflictions of mind and body, to read books himself or have them read to him by others." To original composition Alfred did not aspire; he was content with giving his people a body of translations of what he deemed the best authors; here again showing his royal good sense. In the selection of his authors, he showed liberality and freedom from Roman, ecclesiastical, imperialist, or other bias. On the one hand he chooses for the benefit of the clergy whom he desired to reform, the "Pastoral Care" of the good Pope, Gregory the Great, the author of the mission which had converted England to Christianity; but on the other hand he chooses the "Consolations of Philosophy," the chief work of Boethius, the last of the Romans, and the victim of the cruel jealousy of Theodoric. Of Boethius Hallam says "Last of the classic writers, in style not impure, though displaying too lavishly that poetic exuberance which had distinguished the two or three preceding centuries; in elevation of sentiment equal to any of the philosophers; and mingling a Christian sanctity with their lessons, he speaks from his prison in the swan-like tones of dying eloquence. The philosophy which consoled him in bonds was soon required in the sufferings of a cruel death. Quenched in his blood, the lamp he had trimmed with a skilful hand gave no more light; the language of Tully and Virgil soon ceased to be spoken; and many ages were to pass away before learned diligence restored its purity, and the union of genius with imitation taught a few modern writers to 'surpass in eloquence' the Latinity of Boethius." Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English, the highest product of that memorable burst of Saxon intellect which followed the conversion, and a work, not untainted by miracle and legend, yet most remarkable for its historical qualities as well as for its mild and liberal Christianity, is balanced in the king's series of translations by the work of Orosius, who wrote of general and secular history, though with a religious object. In the translation of Orosius, Alfred has inserted a sketch of the geography of Germany, and the reports of explorations made by two mariners under his auspices among the natives dwelling on the coasts of the Baltic and the North Sea—further proof of the variety of his interests and the reach of his mind.

In his prefaces, and in his amplifications and interpolations of the philosophy of Boethius, Alfred comes before us an independent author, and shows us something of his own mind on theology, on philosophy, on government, and generally as to the estate of man. To estimate these passages rightly, we must put ourselves back into the anarchical and illiterate England of the ninth century, and imagine a writer, who, if we could see him, would appear barbarous and grotesque, as would all his equipments and surroundings, and one who had spent his days in a desperate struggle with wolfish Danes, seated at his literary work in his rude Saxon mansion, with his candle-clock protected by the horn lantern against the wind. The utterances of Alfred will then appear altogether worthy of his character and his deeds. He always emphasizes and expands passages which speak either of the responsibilities of rulers or of the nothingness of earthly power; and the reflections are pervaded by a pensiveness which reminds us of Marcus Aurelius. The political world had not much advanced when, six centuries after Alfred, it arrived at Machiavelli.