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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
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