and sheriffs immediately to apply themselves to learning, or to quit their offices.  To facilitate these great purposes, he made a regular foundation of an university, which with great reason is believed to have been at Oxford.  Whatever trouble he took to extend the benefits of learning amongst his subjects, he showed the example himself, and applied to the cultivation of his mind with unparalleled diligence and success.  He could neither read nor write at twelve years old; but he improved his time in such a manner that he became one of the most knowing men of his age, in geometry, in philosophy, in architecture, and in music.  He applied himself to the improvement of his native language; he translated several valuable works from Latin; and wrote a vast number of poems in the Saxon tongue with a wonderful facility and happiness.  He not only excelled in the theory of the arts and sciences, but possessed a great mechanical genius for the executive part; he improved the manner of ship-building, introduced a more beautiful and commodious architecture, and even taught his countrymen the art of making bricks,—­most of the buildings having been of wood before his time.  In a word, he comprehended in the greatness of his mind the whole of government and all its parts at once, and, what is most difficult to human frailty, was at the same time sublime and minute.

Religion, which in Alfred’s father was so prejudicial to affairs, without being in him at all inferior in its zeal and fervor, was of a more enlarged and noble kind; far from being a prejudice to his government, it seems to have been the principle that supported him in so many fatigues, and fed like an abundant source his civil and military virtues.  To his religious exercises and studies he devoted a full third part of his time.  It is pleasant to trace a genius even in its smallest exertions,—­in measuring and allotting his time for the variety of business he was engaged in.  According to his severe and methodical custom, he had a sort of wax candles made of different colors in different proportions, according to the time he allotted to each particular affair; as he carried these about with him wherever he went, to make them burn evenly he invented horn lanterns.  One cannot help being amazed that a prince, who lived in such turbulent times, who commanded personally in fifty-four pitched battles, who had so disordered a province to regulate, who was not only a legislator, but a judge, and who was continually superintending his armies, his navies, the traffic of his kingdom, his revenues, and the conduct of all his officers, could have bestowed so much of his time on religious exercises and speculative knowledge; but the exertion of all his faculties and virtues seemed to have given a mutual strength to all of them.  Thus all historians speak of this prince, whose whole history was one panegyric; and whatever dark spots of human frailty may have adhered to such a character, they are entirely hid in the splendor of his many shining qualities and grand virtues, that throw a glory over the obscure period in which he lived, and which is for no other reason worthy of our knowledge.