"And the folk hym leide on, ay the lenge the more,

Byhynde and biside, and also before."

The noble duke Sir Perdicas, who was in the host without, then got upon the wall, and seeing the great fray leapt into it. He killed sixtyfive, and saved the king's life, until the army had stormed the town, which was then soon taken and burnt.

Afterwards Alexander saw the Isles of Cormorans and Bramans. The people in Bramans live a life of penance, eating only herbs and fruit, inhabiting trees and dens. They also burn themselves alive to win the joys of Paradise. Then Alexander meant to pass the sea again, and war upon the Frenchmen, Germans and English, Bretons, Irish, and Danes. But a black man with no neck, one eye, one foot, and the voice of a bull told him that over the sea, right in the north, were men indeed worth conquering, the godless sons of Nebrot, builder of the tower in Babylon after Noah's flood; they lived in Taracun, feeding on adders and on dragon's flesh, and on man's flesh and blood, which was their sweetest meat. Whatever is most unnatural, that they hold to be best. To have the mastery of them would be to win most praise. So the king levied a great host, and sailed to Taracun, capital of the land of Magog. The sons of Nebrot gathered in their marshes and their narrow defiles, and slew many of the invaders. The king's arms and devices failed, and after sacrificing on Mount Celion he remembered the land called Meopante, which is between Egypt and Ind, which is indeed not land but water, and where men dwell among fishes, within gates built of a bitumen that becomes hard as iron, having power irresistible against all water, salt or clear. The king dived to this isle of Meopante, and therein he learnt the wonders of the deep. When he had lived there half a year, he loaded many thousand ships with the strange clay of the place, that no water can dissolve, no metal break. Then he set half his army to engage the monsters of Taracun in battle for sixty, forty and two days, while, with help from the men of Meopante, he stopped the way from Magog by the Sea of Calpias-it was but a single passage between two rocks; also with that tough clay he stopped the passes, through which only there was any land-way out of Taracun, except over a mountain that reached to the sky. So he bound up and confined the Taracountes and Magogecas, the Gogas, the Vetas, and the Durwes, and the Wolflings and twenty-five folk more, every one fouler than the other. As King Alexander bound them, they remain shut up till Antichrist shall come and set them free, and lead them to lay waste the world, and tear with their teeth all who will not serve him.

Then Alexander went to Ethiopia, and saw many more strange peoples: the Cenophalis doing no work, living entirely on each other's milk; the Azachy, eaters of elephants; the Mauritimy, good archers, with eyes behind as well as before; the Archapitis, who run on all fours ; the fair and courteous people of Macropy in the East, whose capital is Sheba, whence the queen came for whom Solomon served Mahomet. Between that land and Paradise is nothing but a desert plain. There is another people without nose or mouth, but only a small hole under the chin, where their wind goes out and in. They suck milk through a reed. Having no tongue, they talk by motions of the hand. These are the Orisiné. Another people, the Auryalyn, have long ears, in which they wrap themselves to keep out wind and weather. But of all the world the Garranien are the foullest men.

When he had seen and conquered all that was in Egypt, Alexander went with his host through a green wood, where he saw women sprouting up out of the ground, some with their heads only, some more above the surface; and when they were all grown up they walked away. Men can only marry these women by force, and then their cries bring around them others of their kind, who fall on them and tear them all to pieces. These people are called the Archdraks.

And many more of the world's wonders Alexander had seen when, on his way back to India, he passed the realms of Queen Candace, who loved him, and whom he loved, though they had never seen each other. She sent her son to bid him to her court, but he marched. She had sent also a cunning man secretly to model in clay for her the portrait of the conqueror. That she kept in her bower, and by that she knew him.

Directed by two old men, King Alexander visited in a sacred land, among the spice-groves of a great mountain, the miraculous trees of the sun and moon. He questioned them about his fate, and, though he tried their patience, learnt from them that he should die by poison on the 24th of March in the next year. Then after more marches and sufferings from adders, dragons, and wild beasts, while waiting for fresh succours he built a city in the desert, which he named Alexandria. His distress emboldened Porus to defy him; but in the ensuing battle Alexander killed Porus and became possessor of his throne.

After this Candulake, Candace's son, came to the conqueror for help against a tyrant who had carried off his wife. The king caused Tholomy to wear his robes and pass for Alexander, while he himself went as Antigonus to redress the wrongs of the suppliant. Candulake returned to swear fealty to the mimic Alexander, who was bidden to profess a

great desire to test the reports of Candace's beauty. He sent home therefore, with Candulake, King Alexander, still in his disguise; but by the model in her chamber Candace recognised him, and employed her woman's wit to win him to her arms. Thus Alexander remained happy in love at the court of Candace, the fairest and the richest of all queens, till, having been discovered, he departed suddenly, rejoined his host, and marched to the great borough of Babylon, which he proposed to make his capital. He summoned all kings, dukes, barons and earls, princes, knights, freemen and churls, for he thought to go, after summer, into Africa; but in the meantime Antipater, who had been accused of false-dealing in the justice-seat and feared his punishment, sent to the king a gift of poisoned wine. He died of it, but before death parted his kingdom among his barons, and they buried him by counsel of a bird in his own town of Alexandria.

CHAPTER XII.

FOUNDATION OF THE DOMINICANS AND FRANCISCANS

Reformers

GROSSETESTE-ROGER BACON.

IN the year 1209, by the inspiration of Amaury, abbot of that Citeaux whence the Cistercians, hated of Walter Map, derived their name, there was a massacre in in France. France of those who had gone farthest upon the way the English mind was travelling. The followers of Peter Waldus--called after him Vaudois, and Albigenses from the town of Alby, where their influence was greatest-had spread through the south of France their growing spirit of antagonism to the corruptions of the Church of Rome. They opposed the doctrine of the Mass then current; they did not believe in purgatory; they denounced image-worship; and they set up against an ecclesiastical religion, degenerate by too much intercourse with the lusts of the flesh and the pomps and vanities of the schools, a pure and strict observance of the rules of life and doctrine drawn by themselves from the word of Christ and his Apostles. The massacre in France of the Albigenses in 1209 bears nearly the same relation to our English struggle of mind in the days of Wyclif that the massacre of St. Bartholomew bore to our English Reformation in the sixteenth century. England, as this tale of her mind in her literature will inevitably show, has lived, lives, and will live on hereafter, in her people : France has lived too much in her chiefs. France, too, would have secured her part in the liberty of thought

brought with the Reformation, had not the leaders of the Huguenots disdained the inspiration and despised the service of the common people. Leaving the strength of their deep sympathy to waste itself in undirected effort, they preferred the formal service of hired men-at-arms, although they had the hope and vigour of the nation at their beck.

They were two Cistercian monks, Peter de Castelnau and Ralph, to whom in 1203 Innocent III. gave extraordinary commission to root out the heresy in Languedoc which had Raymond VI., Count of Toulouse, for a protector. As the Cistercians excommunicated Raymond, one of them (Peter of Castelnau) was in 1208 killed by a gentleman of Raymond's household. Then a crusade was proclaimed against the sovereign, who was declared worse than a Saracen and heathen, since he was a Christian and a heretic. The same offers of spiritual advantage by which men had formerly been drawn to Palestine brought, at the Pope's bidding, an eager host to Lyons. Marching thence, in the year 1209, through summer fields and woods into Languedoc, the Pope's new Crusaders stormed the town of Bézières and massacred its people. "How," asked a knight of the Cistercian abbot, Amaury, who was joined to Simon de Montfort as director of the bloody work-" how shall we distinguish heretic from faithful?" "Slay them all!" said the Cistercian; "for the Lord will know His own.” It is in the midst of this popular struggle that we first meet Origin of the with the Spanish Dominic, founder of one of Dominican those two orders of friars-the Dominican and the Franciscan-which in the thirteenth century did more than all other religious orders to restore health to theology and scholarship, and to bring charity back into the visible. Church - system. Each of these two orders had a distinct central idea; but the Dominicans brought out of the Church doctrine, the Franciscans, pity, both in the same

U-VOL. III.

Friars.