Now, note broadly the course and action of this rule, as it combines with the older one.  St. Augustine’s, accepted heartily by Clovis, and, with various degrees of understanding, by the kings and queens of the Merovingian dynasty, makes seemingly little difference in their conduct, so that their profession of it remains a scandal to Christianity to this day; and yet it lives, in the true hearts among them, down from St. Clotilde to her great grand-daughter Bertha, who in becoming Queen of Kent, builds under its chalk downs her own little chapel to St. Martin, and is the first effectively and permanently useful missionary to the Saxons, the beginner of English Erudition,—­the first laid corner stone of beautiful English character.

I think henceforward you will find the memorandum of dates which I have here set down for my own guidance more simply useful than those confused by record of unimportant persons and inconsequent events, which form the indices of common history.

From the year of the Saxon invasion 449, there are exactly 400 years to the birth of Alfred, 849.  You have no difficulty in remembering those cardinal years.  Then, you have Four great men and great events to remember, at the close of the fifth century.  Clovis, and the founding of Frank Kingdom; Theodoric and the founding of the Gothic Kingdom; Justinian and the founding of Civil law; St. Benedict and the founding of Religious law.

Of, Justinian, and his work, I am not able myself to form any opinion—­and it is, I think, unnecessary for students of history to form any, until they are able to estimate clearly the benefits, and mischief, of the civil law of Europe in its present state.  But to Clovis, Theodoric, and St. Benedict, without any question, we owe more than any English historian has yet ascribed,—­and they are easily held in mind together, for Clovis ascended the Frank throne in the year of St. Benedict’s birth, 481.  Theodoric fought the battle of Verona, and founded the Ostrogothic Kingdom in Italy twelve years later, in 493, and thereupon married the sister of Clovis.  That marriage is always passed in a casual sentence, as if a merely political one, and while page after page is spent in following the alternations of furious crime and fatal chance, in the contests between Fredegonde and Brunehaut, no historian ever considers whether the great Ostrogoth who wore in the battle of Verona the dress which his mother had woven for him, was likely to have chosen a wife without love!—­or how far the perfectness, justice, and temperate wisdom of every ordinance of his reign was owing to the sympathy and counsel of his Frankish queen.

You have to recollect, then, thus far, only three cardinal dates:—­

  449.  Saxon invasion.
  481.  Clovis reigns and St. Benedict is born.
  493.  Theodoric conquers at Verona.