worse in Wessex which had been as yet the most ignorant of the English kingdoms.  “When I began to reign,” said AElfred, “I cannot remember one priest south of the Thames who could render his service-book into English.”  For instructors indeed he could find only a few Mercian prelates and priests with one Welsh bishop, Asser.  “In old times,” the King writes sadly, “men came hither from foreign lands to seek for instruction, and now if we are to have it we can only get it from abroad.”  But his mind was far from being prisoned within his own island.  He sent a Norwegian ship-master to explore the White Sea, and Wulfstan to trace the coast of Esthonia; envoys bore his presents to the churches of India and Jerusalem, and an annual mission carried Peter’s-pence to Rome.  But it was with the Franks that his intercourse was closest, and it was from them that he drew the scholars to aid him in his work of education.  Grimbald came from St. Omer to preside over his new abbey at Winchester; and John, the Old Saxon, was fetched it may be from the Westphalian abbey of Corbey to rule the monastery that AElfred’s gratitude for his deliverance from the Danes raised in the marshes of Athelney.  The real work however to be done was done, not by these teachers but by the King himself.  AElfred established a school for the young nobles at his own court, and it was to the need of books for these scholars in their own tongue that we owe his most remarkable literary effort.  He took his books as he found them—­they were the popular manuals of his age—­the Consolation of Boethius, the Pastoral Book of Pope Gregory, the compilation of “Orosius,” then the one accessible handbook of universal history, and the history of his own people by Baeda.  He translated these works into English, but he was far more than a translator, he was an editor for his people.  Here he omitted, there he expanded.  He enriched “Orosius” by a sketch of the new geographical discoveries in the North.  He gave a West-Saxon form to his selections from Baeda.  In one place he stops to explain his theory of government, his wish for a thicker population, his conception of national welfare as consisting in a due balance of the priest, the thegn, and the churl.  The mention of Nero spurs him to an outbreak on the abuses of power.  The cold Providence of Boethius gives way to an enthusiastic acknowledgement of the goodness of God.  As he writes, his large-hearted nature flings off its royal mantle, and he talks as a man to men.  “Do not blame me,” he prays with a charming simplicity, “if any know Latin better than I, for every man must say what he says and do what he does according to his ability.”  But simple as was his aim, AElfred changed the whole front of our literature.  Before him, England possessed in her own tongue one great poem and a train of ballads and battle-songs.  Prose she had none.  The mighty roll of the prose books that fill her libraries begins with the translations of AElfred, and above