r fancies, than curb their tempers and mould
their hearts.

We have seen the career of Sweyn; but Sweyn was an angel of light
compared to his brother Tostig. He who can be penitent has ever
something lofty in his original nature; but Tostig was remorseless as the
tiger, as treacherous and as fierce. With less intellectual capacities
than any of his brothers, he had more personal ambition than all put
together. A kind of effeminate vanity, not uncommon with daring natures
(for the bravest races and the bravest soldiers are usually the vainest;
the desire to shine is as visible in the fop as in the hero), made him
restless both for command and notoriety. "May I ever be in the mouths of
men," was his favourite prayer. Like his maternal ancestry, the Danes,
he curled his long hair, and went as a bridegroom to the feast of the
ravens.

Two only of that house had studied the Humane Letters, which were no
longer disregarded by the princes of the Continent; they were the sweet
sister, the eldest of the family, fading fast in her loveless home, and
Harold.

But Harold's mind,--in which what we call common sense was carried to
genius,--a mind singularly practical and sagacious, like his father's,
cared little for theological learning and priestly legend--for all that
poesy of religion in which the Woman was wafted from the sorrows of
earth.

Godwin himself was no favourite of the Church, and had seen too much of
the abuses of the Saxon priesthood, (perhaps, with few exceptions, the
most corrupt and illiterate in all Europe, which is saying much,) to
instil into his children that reverence for the spiritual authority which
existed abroad; and the enlightenment, which in him was experience in
life, was in Harold, betimes, the result of study and reflection. The
few books of the classical world then within reach of the student opened
to the young Saxon views of human duties and human responsibilities
utterly distinct from the unmeaning ceremonials and fleshly
mortifications in which even the higher theology of that day placed the
elements of virtue. He smiled in scorn when some Dane, whose life had
been passed in the alternate drunkenness of wine and of blood, thought he
had opened the gates of heaven by bequeathing lands gained by a robber's
sword, to pamper the lazy sloth of some fifty monks. If those monks had
presumed to question his own actions, his disdain would have been mixed
with simple wonder that men so besot