religion, the lord of their hearts a war god; their only heaven was that of the brave, their only hell that of the coward; and the joys of Paradise were a renewal of the fierce combat and the fierce carouse of earth. Some of them wound themselves up on the eve of battle to a frenzy like that of a Malay running amuck. But this was, at all events, a religion of action, not of ceremonial or spell; and it quelled the fear of death. In some legends of the Norse mythology there is a humorous element which shows freedom of spirit; while in others, such as the legend of the death of Balder, there is a pathos not uncongenial to Christianity. The Northmen were not priest-ridden. Their gods were not monstrous and overwhelming forces like the hundred-handed idols of the Hindu, but human forms, their own high qualities idealized, like the gods of the Greek, though with Scandinavian force in place of Hellenic grace. Converted to Christianity, the Northman transferred his enthusiasm, his martial prowess and his spirit of adventure from the service of Odin to that of Christ, and became a devotee and a crusader. But in his unconverted state he was an exterminating enemy of Christianity; and Christianity was the civilization as well as the religion of England. Scarcely had the Saxon kingdom been united by Egbert, when the barks of the Northmen appeared, filling the English Charlemagne, no doubt, with the same foreboding sorrow with which they had filled his Frankish prototype and master. In the course of the half century which followed, the swarms of rovers constantly increased, and grew more pertinacious and daring in their attacks. Leaving their ships they took horses, extended their incursions inland, and formed in the interior of the country strongholds, into which they brought the plunder of the district. At last they in effect conquered the North and Midland, and set up a satrap king, as the agent of their extortion. They seem, like the Franks of Clovis, to have quartered themselves as "guests" upon the unhappy people of the land. The monasteries and churches were the special objects of their attacks, both as the seats of the hated religion, and as the centres of wealth; and their sword never spared a monk. Croyland, Peterborough, Huntingdon and Ely, were turned to blood- stained ashes. Edmund, the Christian chief of East Anglia, found a martyrdom, of which one of the holiest and most magnificent of English abbeys was afterwards the monument. The brave Algar, another East Anglian chieftain, having taken the holy sacrament with all his followers on the eve of battle, perished with them in a desperate struggle, overcome by the vulpine cunning of the marauders. Among the leaders of the Northmen were the terrible brothers Ingrar and Ubba, fired, if the Norse legend may be trusted, by revenge as well as by the love of plunder and horror; for they were the sons of that Ragnar Lodbrok who had perished in the serpent tower of the Saxon Ella. When