The tragedy at the “Silent Pool” and the Auto-da-fe are perhaps the most dramatic scenes in the book,—­as the Robin Hood gathering in Combe Valley is the most picturesque.

* * * * *

I quote a few particulars from one of my diaries.  “This book tended to clear my brain of sundry fancies and pictures, as only the writing of another book could do that.  Its seed is truly recorded in the first chapter as to the two stone coffins still in the chancel of St. Martha’s.  I began the book on November 26, 1857, and finished it in exactly eight weeks, on January 21, 1858, reading for the work included.  In two months more it was printed by Hurst & Blackett.  I intended it for one full volume, but the publishers preferred to issue it in two scant ones; it has since been reproduced by Lasham, Guildford, in one vol., at one-and-sixpence; it was 14s.  I consulted and partially read for it (as I wanted accurate pictures of John’s reign in England) the histories of Tyrrell, Hollingshed, Hume, Poole, Markland, Thomson’s Magna Charta, James’s Philip Augustus, Milman’s Latin Christianity, Hallam’s Middle Ages, Maimbourg’s Lives of the Popes, Ranke’s Life of Innocent III., Maitland on the Dark Ages, Ritson’s Life of Robin Hood, Salmon’s, Bray’s, and Brayley’s Surrey, Tupper’s and Duncan’s Guernsey, besides the British and National and other Encyclopaedias and Dictionaries as required.  It was a work of hard and quick and fervid labour, not an idle piece of mere brain-spinning, and it may be depended on for archaeological accuracy in every detail.  More than thirty localities in our beautiful county Surrey are painted in the book; of other parts of England twelve; of France and Italy twelve; there are more than twenty historical characters honestly (as I judge) depicted; and some fifteen ideal ones fairly enough invented as accessories:  I preferred Stephan to the commoner Stephen, for etymological and archaeological reasons:  it is clearly nearer the Greek, and is spelt so in ancient records.”

King Alfred’s own Poems.

One of the rarest of the books I have written (if any bibliomaniac of some future age desires to collect them) must always be “King Alfred’s Poems, now first turned into English metres;” for the little volume was privately printed by Dr. Allen Giles, the edition being only of 250 copies, which soon vanished, a few of them bearing Hall & Virtue’s name on a new title, and being dated 1850,—­the majority hailing from the private press aforesaid.  I constructed it purposely for the “Jubilee Edition of the Works of King Alfred,” learning as well as I could (by the help of Dr. Bosworth’s Dictionary and a Grammar) in a few weeks a little Anglo-Saxon,—­and I confess considerably assisted by Mr. Fox’s prose translation of Boethius.  There are thirty-one poems in all, some being of Alfred’s own, but the major part rendered by the wise king out of Latin into the language of his own people to help their teaching.