quer coffin-nails, cannot be improving;
and while I grant great evil in my desultory excesses, still I may make
some use of that argument in the converse, and plead that it is good to
exercise the mind on all things. Thus, in my assumed metier of
authorship, let notions be extenuated that popularly concern it little,
and yield admittance to any thought that may lead to that Athenian
desideratum, "some new thing."

While the echoes of the name of Alfred still linger on the mind, and our
patriotism looks back with gratitude on his thousand virtues unsullied
by a fault, (at least that History, seldom so indulgent, has
recorded,)--while we reflect that in him were combined the wise king,
the victorious general, the enlightened scholar, the humble Christian,
the learned author, the excellent father, the admirable MAN in
all public and private relations, in domestic alike with social duties,
I cannot help wishing that forgetful England had raised some
architectural trophy, as a worthy testimonial of Alfred the noble and
the good. Whether Oxford, his pet child--or Westminster Hall, as mindful
of the code he gave us--or Greenwich, as the evening resting-place of
those sons of thunder whom the genius of Alfred first raised up to man
our wooden walls--should be the site of some great national memorial,
might admit of question; but there can be none that something of the
kind has been owing now near upon a thousand years, and that it will
well become us to claim boastingly for England so true, so glorious a
hero. With a view to expedite this object, and strictly to bear upon the
topic in author-fashion, it has come into my thought how much we want a

LIFE OF ALFRED:

my little reading knows of none, beyond what dictionaries have gathered
from popular history and vague tradition, rather than manuscripts of old
time, and Asser, the original biographer. Of this last work, written
originally in Saxon, and since translated into Latin, I submit that a
popular English version is imperatively called for; a translation from a
translation being never advisable, (compare Smollett's Anglo-Gallified
dilution of '_Don Quixote_,') the primary source should be again
consulted; and seeing that profound ignorance of the ancient Saxon
coupled with, as now, total indifference about its acquisition, place me
in the list of incapables, I leave the good suggestion to be used by
pundits of the Camden or Roxburghe or other book-learned society. If it