Alfred appeared upon the scene, Wessex itself, the heritage of the house of Cerdic and the supreme kingdom, was in peril from the Pagans, who had firmly entrenched themselves at Reading, in the angle between the Thames and Kennet, and English Christianity was threatened with destruction. A younger but a favourite child, Alfred was sent in his infancy by his father to Rome to receive the Pope's blessing. He was thus affiliated, as it were, to that Roman element, ecclesiastical and political, which, combined with the Christian and Teutonic elements, has made up English civilization. But he remained through life a true Teuton. He went a second time, in company with his father, to Rome, still a child, yet old enough, especially if he was precocious, to receive some impressions from the city of historic grandeur, ancient art, ecclesiastical order, centralized power. There is a pretty legend, denoting the docility of the boy and his love of learning, or at least of the national lays; but he was also a hunter and a warrior. From his youth he had a thorn in his flesh, in the shape of a mysterious disease, perhaps epilepsy, to which monkish chroniclers have given an ascetic and miraculous turn; and this enhances our sense of the hero's moral energy in the case of Alfred, as in that of William III. As "Crown Prince," to use the phrase of a German writer, Alfred took part with his elder brother, King Ethelbert, in the mortal struggle against the Pagans, then raging around Reading and along the rich valley through which the 'Great Western Railway' now runs, and where a Saxon victory is commemorated by the White Horse, which forms the subject of a little work by Thomas Hughes, a true representative, if any there be, of the liegemen and soldiers of King Alfred. When Ethelbert was showing that in him at all events Christianity was not free from the ascetic taint, by continuing to hear mass in his tent when the moment had come for decisive action, Alfred charged up-hill "like a wild boar" against the heathen, and began a battle which, his brother at last coming up, ended in a great victory. The death of Ethelbert, in the midst of the crisis, placed the perilous crown on Alfred's head. Ethelbert left infant sons, but the monarchy was elective, though one of the line of Cerdic was always chosen; and those were the days of the real king, the ruler judge, and captain of the people, not of what Napoleon called the _cochon a l'engrais a cinq millions par an_. In pitched battles, eight of which were fought in rapid succession, the English held their own; but they were worn out, and at length could no longer be brought into the field. Whether a faint monkish tradition of the estrangement of the people by unpopular courses on the part of the young king has any substance of truth we cannot say.