o him, as M. Rostand says to the Austrian Prince:

"Dors, ce n'est pas toujours la Legende qui ment:
Une reve est parfois moins trompeur qu'un document."

To have a man so simple and so honourable to represent us in the
darkness of primeval history, binds all the intervening centuries
together, and mollifies all their monstrosities. It makes all history
more comforting and intelligible; it makes the desolate temple of the
ages as human as an inn parlour.

But whether it come through reliable facts or through more reliable
falsehoods the personality of Alfred has its own unmistakable colour and
stature. Lord Rosebery uttered a profound truth when he said that that
personality was peculiarly English. The great magnificence of the
English character is expressed in the word "service." There is, perhaps,
no nation so vitally theocratical as the English; no nation in which the
strong men have so consistently preferred the instrumental to the
despotic attitude, the pleasures of the loyal to the pleasures of the
royal position. We have had tyrants like Edward I. and Queen Elizabeth,
but even our tyrants have had the worried and responsible air of
stewards of a great estate. Our typical hero is such a man as the Duke
of Wellington, who had every kind of traditional and external arrogance,
but at the back of all that the strange humility which made it
physically possible for him without a gleam of humour or discomfort to
go on his knees to a preposterous bounder like George IV. Across the
infinite wastes of time and through all the mists of legend we still
feel the presence in Alfred of this strange and unconscious
self-effacement. After the fullest estimate of our misdeeds we can still
say that our very despots have been less self-assertive than many
popular patriots. As we consider these things we grow more and more
impatient of any modern tendencies towards the enthronement of a more
self-conscious and theatrical ideal. Lord Rosebery called up before our
imaginations the picture of what Alfred would have thought of the vast
modern developments of his nation, its immense fleet, its widespread
Empire, its enormous contribution to the mechanical civilisation of the
world. It cannot be anything but profitable to conceive Alfred as full
of astonishment and admiration at these things; it cannot be anything
but good for us that we should realise that to the childlike eyes of a
great man of old time our inventions and appliances