Alcuin (735-804), a pupil of the school of York, lived at the worst period of the savage attacks made by the still heathen Danes on England. What the Anglo-Saxons had done to the Britons, the Danes after 780 did to the Anglo-Saxons, slaying, plundering, torturing, and burning, wherever they came. Happily for Alcuin he passed most of his life abroad, aiding the great Emperor Charlemagne in founding schools and fostering education. Charlemagne collected the old war-songs of his people, little dreaming that in three centuries he would become as fabulous a hero, in the French epic poems of the eleventh to the thirteenth century, as Beowulf or Alboin had been in Germanic lays. Alcuin had far more influence as a lecturer and as a writer of letters than as an author; in a poem he preserves the names of the books in the libraries of York and Wearmouth, beautiful manuscripts that would now be almost priceless, but the Danes burned them all. Other Latin writers there were, they mainly dealt with religious themes, and their works are of very little importance. Alfred. Not till the kingdom of the West Saxons, Wessex, became the most powerful state in England, and made successful resistance to the Scandinavian invaders, who had destroyed monasteries everywhere, were learning and literature able to raise their heads again. It was the most famous of English kings, Alfred (849-901), that, among all his other labours as warrior and ruler, restored education. It is unfortunate that so many matters of interest in Anglo-Saxon times are veiled in obscurity. The "Life of Alfred," by Asser, a Welshman, Bishop of Sherborne, is a confused record. Alfred was certainly taken to Rome by his father at a very early age, but all that is told on this subject is most perplexing. He is said to have been untaught in the art of reading till he was 12 years old, but he heard Anglo-Saxon poems repeated by others, and knew many of them by heart. The famous tale that his mother offered a book of Anglo-Saxon poems to the first of her sons who should "learn it," and that Alfred was taken by the beauty of the illuminations, learned to read, and won the prize, is absolutely unintelligible in Asser's Latin. But Asser says, and Alfred, in his Preface to an Anglo-Saxon translation of Pope Gregory's "Pastoral Care" himself avers, that learning was almost or quite extinct south of the Humber, when his reign began, while in Northumbria matters were little better. But his father's second wife, Judith, was daughter to the Emperor, Charles the Bald, and though Judith, a young girl, was far from being sedate and erudite, the connexion with the Continent enabled Alfred to bring over Frankish scholars, such as Grimbald, while from Wales came Asser, who, for part of each year, lived with Alfred as his tutor.