His intellectual activity breathed fresh life into education and literature.  His capacity for inspiring trust and affection drew the hearts of Englishmen to a common centre, and began the upbuilding of a new England.  And all was guided, controlled, ennobled by a single aim.  “So long as I have lived,” said the King as life closed about him, “I have striven to live worthily.”  Little by little men came to know what such a life of worthiness meant.  Little by little they came to recognize in AElfred a ruler of higher and nobler stamp than the world had seen.  Never had it seen a King who lived solely for the good of his people.  Never had it seen a ruler who set aside every personal aim to devote himself solely to the welfare of those whom he ruled.  It was this grand self-mastery that gave him his power over the men about him.  Warrior and conqueror as he was, they saw him set aside at thirty the warrior’s dream of conquest; and the self-renouncement of Wedmore struck the key-note of his reign.  But still more is it this height and singleness of purpose, this absolute concentration of the noblest faculties to the noblest aim, that lifts AElfred out of the narrow bounds of Wessex.  If the sphere of his action seems too small to justify the comparison of him with the few whom the world owns as its greatest men, he rises to their level in the moral grandeur of his life.  And it is this which has hallowed his memory among his own English people.  “I desire,” said the King in some of his latest words, “I desire to leave to the men that come after me a remembrance of me in good works.”  His aim has been more than fulfilled.  His memory has come down to us with a living distinctness through the mists of exaggeration and legend which time gathered round it.  The instinct of the people has clung to him with a singular affection.  The love which he won a thousand years ago has lingered round his name from that day to this.  While every other name of those earlier times has all but faded from the recollection of Englishmen, that of AElfred remains familiar to every English child.

[Sidenote:  English Literature]

The secret of AElfred’s government lay in his own vivid energy.  He could hardly have chosen braver or more active helpers than those whom he employed both in his political and in his educational efforts.  The children whom he trained to rule proved the ablest rulers of their time.  But at the outset of his reign he stood alone, and what work was to be done was done by the King himself.  His first efforts were directed to the material restoration of his realm.  The burnt and wasted country saw its towns built again, forts erected in positions of danger, new abbeys founded, the machinery of justice and government restored, the laws codified and amended.  Still more strenuous were AElfred’s efforts for its moral and intellectual restoration.  Even in Mercia and Northumbria the pirates’ sword had left few survivors of the schools of Ecgberht or Baeda, and matters were even