author, who
was equally likely to have picked up his quotation second-hand.

So, when a reference is made either by Graville, or by any one else in
the romance, to Homeric fables and personages, a critic who had gone
through the ordinary education of an English gentleman would never
thereby have assumed that the person so referring had read the poems of
Homer themselves--he would have known that Homeric fables, or personages,
though not the Homeric poems, were made familiar, by quaint travesties
[7], even to the most illiterate audience of the gothic age. It was
scarcely more necessary to know Homer then than now, in order to have
heard of Ulysses. The writer in the Athenaeum is acquainted with Homeric
personages, but who on earth would ever presume to assert that he is
acquainted with Homer?

Some doubt has been thrown upon my accuracy in ascribing to the
Anglo-Saxon the enjoyments of certain luxuries (gold and silver
plate--the use of glass, etc.), which were extremely rare in an age much
more recent. There is no ground for that doubt; nor is there a single
article of such luxury named in the text, for the mention of which I have
not ample authority.

I have indeed devoted to this work a degree of research which, if unusual
to romance, I cannot consider superfluous when illustrating an age so
remote, and events unparalleled in their influence over the destinies of
England. Nor am I without the hope, that what the romance-reader at
first regards as a defect, he may ultimately acknowledge as a
merit;--forgiving me that strain on his attention by which alone I could
leave distinct in his memory the action and the actors in that solemn
tragedy which closed on the field of Hastings, over the corpse of the
Last Saxon King.

CONTENTS

BOOK FIRST
The Norman Visitor, the Saxon King, and the Danish Prophetess

BOOK SECOND
Lanfranc the Scholar

BOOK THIRD
The House of Godwin

BOOK FOURTH
The Heathen Altar and the Saxon Church

BOOK FIFTH
Death and Love

BOOK SIXTH
Ambition

BOOK SEVENTH
The Welch King

BOOK EIGHTH
Fate

BOOK NINTH
The Bones of the Dead

BOOK TENTH
The Sacrifice on the Altar

BOOK ELEVENTH
The Norman Schemer, and the Norwegian Sea-king

BOOK TWELFTH
The Battle of Hastings

HAROLD, THE LAST OF THE SAXON KINGS

by Edward Bulwer Lytton

BOOK I.
THE NORMAN VISITOR, THE SAXON KING, AND THE DANISH PROPHETESS.

CHAPTER I.

Merry was the month of May in t