l and Irminsula, their feasting,
and their robes.]

[Footnote 28: Again, what does this mean? Gifts of honour to the
Pope's immediate attendants--silver to all Rome? Does the modern
reader think this is buying little Alfred's consecration too dear, or
that Leo is selling the Holy Ghost?]

No idle sacrifices or symbols, these gifts of courtesy! The Saxon King
rebuilt on the highest hill that is bathed by Tiber, the Saxon street
and school, the Borgo,[29] of whose miraculously arrested burning
Raphael's fresco preserves the story to this day. And further
he obtained from Leo the liberty of all Saxon men from bonds
in penance;--a first phase this of Magna Charta, obtained more
honourably, from a more honourable person, than that document, by
which Englishmen of this day, suppose they live, move, and have being.

[Footnote 29: "Quae in eorum lingua Burgus dicitur,--the place where it
was situated was called the Saxon street, Saxonum vicum" (Anastasius,
quoted by Turner). There seems to me some evidence in the scattered
passages I have not time to collate, that at this time the Saxon Burg,
or tower, of a village, included the idea of its school.]

How far into Alfred's soul, at seven years old, sank any true image of
what Rome was, and had been; of what her Lion Lord was, who had saved
her from the Saracen, and her Lion Lord had been, who had saved her
from the Hun; and what this Spiritual Dominion was, and was to be,
which could make and unmake kings, and save nations, and put armies to
flight; I leave those to say, who have learned to reverence childhood.
This, at least, is sure, that the days of Alfred were bound each to
each, not only by their natural piety, but by the actual presence and
appeal to his heart, of all that was then in the world most noble,
beautiful, and strong against Death.

In this living Book of God he had learned to read, thus early; and
with perhaps nobler ambition than of getting the prize of a gilded
psalm-book at his mother's knee, as you are commonly told of him. What
sort of psalm-book it was, however, you may see from this leaf in my
hand. For, as his father and he returned from Rome that year, they
stayed again at the Court of Charlemagne's grandson, whose daughter,
the Princess Judith, Ethelwolf was wooing for Queen of England, (not
queen-consort, merely, but crowned queen, of authority equal to his
own.) From whom Alfred was like enough to have had a reading lesson or
two out of her fa