The history of King Alfred, and his noble efforts in the cause of learning, are so familiar to all readers that it may seem unnecessary to say much of the restoration of letters which took place in England during his reign. From our childhood, the stories of his life have been as familiar to us as those of Scripture, and it is probable that the illuminated manuscript which first tempted him to learn his alphabet has encouraged not a few of us in our childish love of picture-books. Every one knows that at the time of his accession England was plunged in her darkest night of ignorance; and every one who has studied Hume, Hallam, and other standard writers, knows that the illiteracy of the English clergy at that precise period is commonly cited as a sample of the state of things which prevailed throughout Europe during the Dark Ages. Hallam, indeed, in a note appended to his remarks on the subject, admits that before the Danish Invasion, the churches were well furnished with books, but adds that “the priests got little good from them, being written in a foreign language they could not understand.”[114] The fact that the state of things complained of was not normal, but accidental, is uniformly ignored by these writers; they beheld the waters of an inundation, and would have their readers believe them to be the ocean in its natural bed. However, far from wishing to deny the ignorance which existed in England at the time of Alfred’s accession, I will add to the colouring of the picture by quoting Dr. Lingard’s brief but emphatic summary of the grievances under which the kingdom then groaned. “At the close of this calamitous period,” he says, after a graphic sketch of the devastations perpetrated by the Danes, “the Anglo-Saxon church presented a melancholy spectacle; the laity had resumed the ferocious manners of their pagan forefathers; the clergy had grown indolent, dissolute, and illiterate; the monastic order was apparently annihilated, and it devolved on Alfred, now victorious over his enemies, to apply remedies to all these evils.”