rimages to
Rome in vain, St. Peter had promised his cure if the King would, on
his own royal neck, carry him to the Monastery. The King immediately
consented; and, amidst the scoffs of the court, bore the poor man to
the steps of the High Altar. There the cripple was received by Godric
the sacristan, and walked away on his own restored feet, hanging his
stool on the wall for a trophy.

"Before that same High Altar was also believed to have been seen
one of the Eucharistical portents, so frequent in the Middle Ages. A
child, 'pure and bright like a spirit,' appeared to the King in the
sacramental elements. Leofric, Earl of Mercia, who, with his famous
countess, Godiva, was present, saw it also.

"Such as these were the motives of Edward. Under their influence
was fixed what has ever since been the local centre of the English
monarchy."

"Such as these were the _motives_ of Edward," says the Dean. Yes,
certainly; but such as these also, first, were the acts and visions
of Edward. Take care that you don't slip away, by the help of the
glycerine of the word "motives," into fancying that all these tales
are only the after colours and pictorial metaphors of sentimental
piety. They are either plain truth or black lies; take your
choice,--but don't tickle and treat yourselves with the prettiness or
the grotesqueness of them, as if they were Anderssen's fairy tales.
Either the King did carry the beggar on his back, or he didn't; either
Godiva rode through Coventry, or she didn't; either the Earl Leofric
saw the vision of the bright child at the altar--or he lied like a
knave. Judge, as you will; but do not Doubt.

"The Abbey was fifteen years in building. The King spent upon it
one-tenth of the property of the kingdom. It was to be a marvel of
its kind. As in its origin it bore the traces of the fantastic and
childish" (I must pause, to ask you to substitute for these blameful
terms, 'fantastic and childish,' the better ones of 'imaginative and
pure') "character of the King and of the age; in its architecture
it bore the stamp of the peculiar position which Edward occupied in
English history between Saxon and Norman. By birth he was a Saxon, but
in all else he was a foreigner. Accordingly the Church at Westminster
was a wide-sweeping innovation on all that had been seen before.
'Destroying the old building,' he says in his charter, 'I have built
up a new one from the very foundation.' Its fame as a 'new style of
compositio