tend them. Alfred thought more of his bow and arrows than he did of the cakes, and let them burn. Then the woman ran in, and cried out: "There, don't you see the cakes on fire? Then wherefore turn them not? You're glad enough to eat them when they're piping hot!"*

It is almost more strange when we are told by some that this swineherd or neatherd afterward became Bishop of Winchester. They say that his name was Denewulf, and that the king said that, though he was in so lowly a rank, he was naturally a very wise man. So he had him taught, and at last gave him the bishopric. But it is hard to believe this, especially as Denewulf, Bishop of Winchester, became bishop the very next year.

VI.

DUNSTAN, THE ECCLESIASTICAL STATESMAN.-GREEN. [The struggle with the Danes gave a new direction to the growth of Wessex. By the Treaty of Wedmore (878) England was divided between Alfred and the Danish leader. Wessex lost her external supremacy, but her immediate territory was largely increased. The impulse, thus given, continued under Alfred's son and grandsons, until, in the reign of Eadgar, the boundaries of Wessex became co-extensive with those of the kingdom of England. This result seems to have been largely due to the able administration of Archbishop Dunstan.]

THE Completion of the West-Saxon realm was, in fact, reserved for the hands, not of a king or warrior, but of a priest. Dunstan stands first in the line of ecclesiastical statesmen, who counted among them Lanfranc and Wolsey, and ended in Laud. He is still more remarkable in himself, in his own vivid personality, after eight centuries of revolution and change. He was born in the little hamlet of Glastonbury, the home of his father, Heorstan, a man of wealth and *The woman's speech is put into two Latin verses. Most likely the whole story comes from a ballad.

brother of the Bishop of Wells and of Winchester. It must have been in his father's hall that the fair, diminutive boy, with his scant but beautiful hair, caught his love for "the vain songs of heathendom, the trifling legends, the funeral chaunts," which afterward roused against him the charge of sorcery. Thence, too, he might have derived his passionate love of music, and his custom of carrying his harp in hand on journey or visit. Wandering scholars of Ireland had left their books in the monastery of Glastonbury, as they left them along the Rhine and the Danube; and Dunstan plunged into the study of sacred and profane letters till his brain broke down in delirium. So famous became his knowledge in the neighborhood that news of it reached the Court of Æthelstan; but his appearance there was the signal for a burst of ill-will among the courtiers. They drove him from the king's train, threw him from his horse as he passed through the marshes, and, with the wild passion of their age, trampled him under foot in the mire. The outrage ended in fever, and Dunstan rose from his sick-bed a monk. But the monastic profession was then little more than a vow of celibacy, and his devotion took no ascetic turn. His nature, in fact, was sunny, versatile, artistic, full of strong affections, and capable of inspiring others with affections as strong. Quick-witted, of tenacious memory, a ready and fluent speaker, gay and genial in address, an artist, a musician, he was at the same time an indefatigable worker at books, at building, at handicraft. As his sphere began to widen we see him followed by a train of pupils, busy with literature, writing, harping, painting, designing. One morning a lady summons him to her house to design a robe which she is embroidering, and as he bends with her maidens over their toil, his harp, hung upon the wall, sounds, without mortal touch, tones which the excited ears around frame into a joyous antiphon.

From this scholar-life Dunstan was called to a wider sphere of activity by the accession of Eadmund. But the old jeal