76 Sir Frederick Pollock [March 3, 



the nature of sin. But to live, work, and fight in the full light of day, 

 a ruler and leader of men ; to dare greatly for great ends, and accom- 

 plish them ; and with all this to leave a fame so clear that no man 

 dares lift a voice against it ; this is not only good and of laudable 

 example, but an evident mark of greatness. And this is how it stands 

 with our King Alfred. He was tried in many ways and failed in none. 

 He was neither a mere exemplar of negative virtues like Edward the 

 Confessor, nor a speculative reformer with inopportune good intentions. 

 Many things came to his hand to do, and every one of them was well 

 done. He is not chargeable, so far as we know, with any one serious 

 error of judgment. It is true that both the military and the ] olitical 

 details of the time are in many ways obscure to us ; and it is certain 

 that Alfred had to suffer one great reverse. But if there had been 

 any ground for supposing that want of any possible precaution on the 

 King's part contributed to it, we may be sure that some record or 

 tradition of it would be preserved. Even the best of rulers must 

 make some enemies if he does his duty without fear. Alfred's 

 enemies could find nothing to say against him, or, at the very least, 

 nothing that was plausible enough to be remembered. We can have 

 no stronger proof that there was really nothing of the kind to be 

 said. 



The bare chronicle and abridgment of King Alfred's deeds is much, 

 but to see them in their full greatness we must try to realise in what 

 manner of world a King of the West-Saxons had to reign in the ninth 

 century. It was a world of hardship and peril ; not occasional, but 

 constant, such as had not been known in a great part of Europe within 

 historical times. The old order of the Roman Empire had broken up. 

 The new order of mediaeval Christendom — itself to be swept away in 

 the convulsions of religious wars when its work was done — was not 

 yet come to the birth, and the new invasions of the heathen North- 

 men threatened to bring a worse chaos than the first. Only the Church, 

 with such remnants of Koman political and official tradition as it had 

 been able to preserve, was a stable power making for civilisation, and 

 saving learning from total extinction. Hobbes's great epigram on the 

 Papacy — " the ghost of the deceased Koman Empire sitting crowned 

 upon the grave thereof " — is not fairly applicable to the early mediaeval 

 Church, which was really preserving the remnant of life till better 

 times. The best that can be said on the whole for the dark ages, as 

 they are commonly and justly called, is that there was still some light 

 in the Church. But Hobbes's equally well-known description of what 

 " is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every 

 man," might be taken for a not highly exaggerated description of the 

 dark ages at their worst : — 



" In such condition, there is no place for industry, because the fruit 

 thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth ; no 

 navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea ; 

 no commodious building ; no instruments of moving, and removing, 

 such things as require much force ; no knowledge of the face of the 



