back from the churches of Malabar.  And side by side with this restless outlook of the artistic nature he showed its tenderness and susceptibility, its vivid apprehension of unseen danger, its craving for affection, its sensitiveness to wrong.  It was with himself rather than with his reader that he communed as thoughts of the foe without, of ingratitude and opposition within, broke the calm pages of Gregory or Boethius.  “Oh, what a happy man was he,” he cries once, “that man that had a naked sword hanging over his head from a single thread; so as to me it always did!” “Desirest thou power?” he asks at another time.  “But thou shalt never obtain it without sorrows—­sorrows from strange folk, and yet keener sorrows from thine own kindred.”  “Hardship and sorrow!” he breaks out again, “not a king but would wish to be without these if he could.  But I know that he cannot!” The loneliness which breathes in words like these has often begotten in great rulers a cynical contempt of men and the judgements of men.  But cynicism found no echo in the large and sympathetic temper of AElfred.  He not only longed for the love of his subjects, but for the remembrance of “generations” to come.  Nor did his inner gloom or anxiety check for an instant his vivid and versatile activity.  To the scholars he gathered round him he seemed the very type of a scholar, snatching every hour he could find to read or listen to books read to him.  The singers of his court found in him a brother singer, gathering the old songs of his people to teach them to his children, breaking his renderings from the Latin with simple verse, solacing himself in hours of depression with the music of the Psalms.  He passed from court and study to plan buildings and instruct craftsmen in gold-work, to teach even falconers and dog-keepers their business.  But all this versatility and ingenuity was controlled by a cool good sense.  AElfred was a thorough man of business.  He was careful of detail, laborious, methodical.  He carried in his bosom a little handbook in which he noted things as they struck him—­now a bit of family genealogy, now a prayer, now such a story as that of Ealdhelm playing minstrel on the bridge.  Each hour of the day had its appointed task, there was the same order in the division of his revenue and in the arrangement of his court.

Wide however and various as was the King’s temper, its range was less wonderful than its harmony.  Of the narrowness, of the want of proportion, of the predominance of one quality over another which goes commonly with an intensity of moral purpose AElfred showed not a trace.  Scholar and soldier, artist and man of business, poet and saint, his character kept that perfect balance which charms us in no other Englishman save Shakspere.  But full and harmonious as his temper was, it was the temper of a king.  Every power was bent to the work of rule.  His practical energy found scope for itself in the material and administrative restoration of the wasted land.