=74. Alfred’s Maladies.=[164]--While his nuptials were being honorably celebrated in Mercia, among innumerable multitudes of both sexes, and after long feasts by night and by day, he was suddenly seized, in the presence of all the people, by instant and overwhelming pain, unknown to any physician. No one there knew, nor even those who daily see him up to the present time--and this, sad to say, is the worst of all, that it should have continued uninterruptedly through the revolutions of so many years, from the twentieth to the fortieth year of his life and more--whence such a malady arose. Many thought that it was occasioned by the favor and fascination of the people who surrounded him; others, by some spite of the devil, who is ever jealous of good men; others, from an unusual kind of fever; while still others thought it was the _ficus_,[165] which species of severe disease he had had from his childhood. On a certain occasion it had come to pass by the divine will that when he had gone to Cornwall on a hunting expedition, and had turned out of the road to pray in a certain church in which rests Saint Gueriir [and now also St. Neot reposes there],[166] he had of his own accord prostrated himself for a long time in silent prayer--since from childhood he had been a frequent visitor of holy places for prayer and the giving of alms--and there he besought the mercy of the Lord that, in his boundless clemency, Almighty God would exchange the torments of the malady which then afflicted him for some other lighter disease, provided that such disease should not show itself outwardly in his body, lest he should be useless and despised--for he had great dread of leprosy or blindness, or any such complaint as instantly makes men useless and despised at its coming. When he had finished his praying, he proceeded on his journey, and not long after felt within himself that he had been divinely healed, according to his request, of that disorder, and that it was entirely eradicated, although he had obtained even this complaint in the first flower of his youth by his devout and frequent prayers and supplications to God. For if I may be allowed to speak concisely, though in a somewhat inverted order, of his zealous piety to God--in his earliest youth, before he married his wife, he wished to establish his mind in God’s commandments, for he perceived that he could not abstain from carnal desires[167]; and because he saw that he should incur the anger of God if he did anything contrary to His will, he used often to rise at cockcrow and at the matin hours, and go to pray in churches and at the relics of the saints. There he would prostrate himself, and pray that Almighty God in His mercy would strengthen his mind still more in the love of His service, converting it fully to Himself by some infirmity such as he might bear, but not such as would render him contemptible and useless in worldly affairs. Now when he had often prayed with much devotion to this effect,