[Footnote 28:  Again, what does this mean?  Gifts of honour to the Pope’s immediate attendants—­silver to all Rome?  Does the modern reader think this is buying little Alfred’s consecration too dear, or that Leo is selling the Holy Ghost?]

No idle sacrifices or symbols, these gifts of courtesy!  The Saxon King rebuilt on the highest hill that is bathed by Tiber, the Saxon street and school, the Borgo,[29] of whose miraculously arrested burning Raphael’s fresco preserves the story to this day.  And further he obtained from Leo the liberty of all Saxon men from bonds in penance;—­a first phase this of Magna Charta, obtained more honourably, from a more honourable person, than that document, by which Englishmen of this day, suppose they live, move, and have being.

[Footnote 29:  “Quae in eorum lingua Burgus dicitur,—­the place where it was situated was called the Saxon street, Saxonum vicum” (Anastasius, quoted by Turner).  There seems to me some evidence in the scattered passages I have not time to collate, that at this time the Saxon Burg, or tower, of a village, included the idea of its school.]

How far into Alfred’s soul, at seven years old, sank any true image of what Rome was, and had been; of what her Lion Lord was, who had saved her from the Saracen, and her Lion Lord had been, who had saved her from the Hun; and what this Spiritual Dominion was, and was to be, which could make and unmake kings, and save nations, and put armies to flight; I leave those to say, who have learned to reverence childhood.  This, at least, is sure, that the days of Alfred were bound each to each, not only by their natural piety, but by the actual presence and appeal to his heart, of all that was then in the world most noble, beautiful, and strong against Death.

In this living Book of God he had learned to read, thus early; and with perhaps nobler ambition than of getting the prize of a gilded psalm-book at his mother’s knee, as you are commonly told of him.  What sort of psalm-book it was, however, you may see from this leaf in my hand.  For, as his father and he returned from Rome that year, they stayed again at the Court of Charlemagne’s grandson, whose daughter, the Princess Judith, Ethelwolf was wooing for Queen of England, (not queen-consort, merely, but crowned queen, of authority equal to his own.) From whom Alfred was like enough to have had a reading lesson or two out of her father’s Bible; and like enough, the little prince, to have stayed her hand at this bright leaf of it, the Lion-leaf, bearing the symbol of the Lion of the tribe of Judah.

You cannot, of course, see anything but the glittering from where you sit; nor even if you afterwards look at it near, will you find a figure the least admirable or impressive to you.  It is not like Landseer’s Lions in Trafalgar Square; nor like Tenniel’s in ‘Punch’; still less like the real ones in Regent’s Park.  Neither do I show it you as admirable in any respect of art, other than