This terse, but sincere and enthusiastic eulogium, on the memory of Julius Cæsar by that stout Puritan, Captain Miles Standish, comes instinctively to the mind, as one contemplates the life of good King Alfred. It is not given to many to be alike famous as sovereign, warrior, lawgiver, and author; but such was Alfred, the first of England's great monarchs. If it is the "cunning," the knowing, or able man, as Carlyle tells us, who is the "king" by Divine right; here was the Saxon king _par excellence_. His lineage was of the most ancient and illustrious; his father Ethelwulf traced his descent from the most renowned of the Saxon heroes, and his mother Osburga was descended from famous Gothic progenitors. Born at the royal manor of Vanathing (Wantage) in the year 849, the youngest of Ethelwulf's four legitimate sons, he was his father's darling, the fairest and most promising of all his boys. This is doubtless the explanation of the fact that, whilst yet a mere child, he accompanied his sire on a pilgrim journey to Rome. How far this pilgrimage and the impressions which he received from his sojourn in what was still the greatest and most civilized city in Europe, may have influenced his after-life and character it is impossible to say; but the earliest story related of Alfred treats of his aptitude for learning and his love for poetry and books. He learned to read before his elder brothers, and even before he could read he had learned by heart many Anglo-Saxon poems, by hearing the minstrels and gleemen recite them in his father's hall. And his passionate love for letters never forsook him. [Illustration: KING ALFRED THE GREAT.] Much, however, as he might have preferred it, there was another life than that of the mere student and scholar laid up in store for this noble Saxon. One after another his three elder brothers, Ethelbald, Ethelbert, and Ethelred, occupied the throne, and it was on the death of the last named, in 871, in the twenty-second year of his age, that reluctantly Alfred had to shut up his books, and take up the sceptre and the sword. He now comes before us as (1). The warrior king.