The struggle with the Northmen was not over. Their swarms came again, in the latter part of Alfred's reign, from Germany, whence they had been repulsed, and from France, which they had exhausted by their ravages. But the king's generalship foiled them and compelled them to depart. Seeing where their strength lay, he built a regular fleet to encounter them on their own element, and he may be called the founder of the Royal Navy. His victory was decisive. The English monarchy rose from the ground in renewed strength, and entered on a fresh lease of greatness. A line of able kings followed Alfred. His son and successor, Edward, inherited his vigour. His favourite grandson, Athelstan, smote the Dane and the Scot together at Brunanburgh, and awoke by his glorious victory the last echoes of Saxon song. Under Edgar the greatness of the monarchy reached its highest pitch, and it embraced the whole island under its imperial ascendancy. At last its hour came; but when Canute founded a Danish dynasty he and his Danes were Christians. "This I can now truly say, that so long as I have lived I have striven to live worthily, and after my death to leave my memory to my descendants in good works." If the king who wrote those words did not found a university or a polity, he restored and perpetuated the foundations of English institutions, and he left what is almost as valuable as any institution--a great and inspiring example of public duty. THE LAST REPUBLICANS OF ROME "Has humanity such forces at its command wherewith to combat vice and baseness, that each school of virtue can afford to repel the aid of the rest, and to maintain that it alone is entitled to the praise of courage, of goodness, and of resignation?" Such is the rebuke administered by M. Renan to the Christians who refuse to recognise the martyrs of Stoicism under the Roman Empire. My eye fell upon the words when I had just laid down Professor Mommsen's harsh judgment of the last defenders of the Republic, and they seemed to me applicable to this case also.