ride with me."

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ousies revived at his re-appearance at court, and, counting the game lost, Dunstan preferred again to withdraw. The king had spent the day in the chase; the red deer which he was pursuing dashed over Cheddar cliffs, and his horse only checked itself on the brink of the ravine at the moment when Eadmund, in the bitterness of death, was repenting of his injustice to Dunstan. He was at once summoned on the king's return. Saddle your horse," said Eadmund, “and The royal train swept over the marshes to his home; and the king, bestowing on him the kiss of peace, seated him in the abbot's chair as Abbot of Glastonbury. Dunstan became one of Eadmund's councilors, and his hand was seen in the settlement of the North. The league between Scot and Briton was finally broken up, and the fidelity of the Scots secured by their need of help in holding down their former ally. The settlement was soon troubled by the young king's death. As he feasted at Pucklechurch, in the May of 946, Leofa, a robber whom Eadmund had banished from the land, entered the hall, seated himself at the royal board, and drew sword on the cup-bearer when he bade him retire. The king sprang in wrath to his thane's aid, and seizing Leofa by the hair, flung him to the ground; but in the struggle the robber drove his dagger to Eadmund's heart. His death at once stirred fresh troubles in the North; the Danelagh rose against his brother and successor, Eadred, and some years of hard fighting were needed before it was again driven to own the English supremacy. But with its submission, in 954, the work of conquest was done. Dogged as his fight had been, the Northman at last owned himself beaten. From the moment of Eadred's final triumph all resistance came to an end. The Danelagh ceased to be a force in English politics. North might part anew from South; men of Yorkshire might again cross swords with men of Hampshire, but their strife was henceforth a local strife between men of the same people; it was a strife of

Englishmen with Englishmen, and not of Englishmen with Northmen.

The death of Eadred, in 955, handed over the realm to a child-king, his nephew, Eadwig. Eadwig was swayed by a woman of high lineage, Æthelgifu; and the quarrel between her and the older councilors of Eadred broke into open strife at the coronation feast. On the young king's insolent withdrawal to her chamber, Dunstan, at the bidding of the Witan, drew him roughly back to his seat. But the feast was no sooner ended than a sentence of outlawry drove the abbot over sea, while the triumph of Æthelgifu was crowned, in 957, by the marriage of her daughter to the king, and the spoliation of the monasteries which Dunstan had befriended. As the new queen was Eadwig's kinswoman, the religious opinion of the day regarded his marriage as incestuous, and it was followed by a revolution. At the opening of 958 Archbishop Odo parted the king from his wife by solemn sentence; while the Mercians and Northumbrians rose in revolt, proclaimed Eadwig's brother Eadgar their king, and recalled Dunstan. The death of Eadwig, a few months later, restored the unity of the realm; but his successor, Eadgar, was only a boy of fourteen, and throughout his reign the actual direction of affairs lay in the hands of Dunstan, whose elevation to the see of Canterbury set him at the head of the Church as of the State. The noblest tribute to his rule lies in the silence of our chroniclers. His work, indeed, was a work of settlement, and such a work was best done by the simple enforcement of peace. During the years of rest in which the stern hand of the Primate enforced justice and order, Northmen and Englishmen drew together into a single people. Their union was the result of no direct policy of fusion; on the contrary, Dunstan's policy preserved to the conquered Danelagh its local rights and local usages. But he recognized the men of the Danelagh as Englishmen: he employed Northmen in the royal service, and promoted them to high posts in Church

and State. For the rest he trusted to time, and time justified his trust. The fusion was marked by a memorable change in the name of the land. Slowly as the conquering tribes had learned to know themselves by the one national name of Englishmen, they learned yet more slowly to stamp their name on the land they had won. It was not till Eadgar's day that the name of Britain passed into the name of Englaland, the land of Englishmen, England. The same vigorous rule which secured rest for the country during these years of national union, told on the growth of material prosperity. Commerce sprang into a wider life. The laws of Æthelred, which provide for the protection and regulation of foreign trade, only recognize a state of things which grew up under Eadgar. It was in Eadgar's day that London rose to commercial greatness.

VII.

CNUT, THE GREAT DANISH KING.-FREEMAN.

[On the accession of the second Æthelred, named the Unready, the Danish wars began again, and soon passed into their third phase—an attempt on the part of the King of all Denmark to subjugate the kingdom of England. The fatal policy was adopted of buying off the invaders. This led to more frequent invasions, and to ever-increasing demands for money, until at length the country was exhausted and could pay no more; while, under the enervating influences of the time, the English military system seems to have utterly broken down. The Conquest, nearly finished by Swegen, was completed by his son Cnut, who thus became King of all England. He won his success by unscrupulous means, but a great change came over him as soon as his power was firmly established.]

THIS gradual change in the disposition of Cnut makes him one of the most remarkable, and, to an Englishman, one of the most interesting, characters in history. There is no other instance-unless Rolf, in Normandy, be admitted as a forerunner on a smaller scale-of a barbarian conqueror, en

tering a country simply as a ruthless pirate, plundering, burning, mutilating, slaughtering, without remorse, and then, as soon as he is seated on the throne of the invaded land, changing into a beneficent ruler and lawgiver, and winning for himself a place side by side with the best and greatest of its native sovereigns. Cnut never became a perfect prince like Ælfred. An insatiable ambition possessed him throughout life, and occasional acts of both craft and violence disfigure the whole of his career. He always found some means, by death, by banishment, by distant promotion, of getting rid of any one who had once awakened his suspicions. Reasons of State were as powerful with him, and led him into as many unscrupulous actions as any more civilized despot of later times. But Englishmen were not disposed to canvass the justice of wars in which they won fame and plunder, while no enemy ever set foot on their own shores. They were as little disposed to canvass the justice of banishments and executions. when, for many years, it was invariably a Dane, never an Englishmen, who was the victim. The law by which the Dane settled in England presently became an Englishman, received its highest carrying out in the person of the illustrious Danish king. As far as England and Englishmen were concerned, Cnut might seem to have acted on the principle of the Greek poet, that unrighteousness might be fittingly practiced in order to obtain a crown, but that righteousness should be practiced in all other times and places. The throne of Cnut, established by devastating wars, by unrighteous executions, perhaps even by treacherous assassinations, was, when once established, emphatically the throne of righteousness and peace. As an English king, he fairly ranks among the noblest of his predecessors.

His best epitaph is his famous letter to his people on his Roman pilgrimage. Such a pilgrimage was an ordinary devotional observance, according to the creed of those times. But in the eyes of Cnut it was clearly much more than a mere