unless they be in some measure associated with God, any more than the wheel’s fellies can be in progress, unless they be attached to the spokes and the spokes to the axle. The fellies are the farthest from the axle; therefore they move the most unevenly. The nave moves next to the axle; and that is why it has the surest motion. So do the happiest men: as they set their love nearer to God, and more resolutely contemn these earthly things, so are they more free from care, and less they reck how Fate may chance to turn, or what it may bring. In like manner the nave is continually so sure, jolt the fellies on whatso they may jolt; and this even though the nave is somewhat apart from the axle. By this figure thou mayest understand that as the waggon is much more durably sound, the less it is parted from the axle; so are those men the freest of all from care (whether about anxieties of this life or of the next) who are fast in God: but in whatever degree they are asunder from God, in the same degree are they worried and harassed, both in mind and in body. This prose simile is unquestioned as an original piece of king Alfred’s authorship, and so is also the poetical epilogue to his _Pastoralis_, which was quoted above in the seventh chapter. Can any one doubt that his mind was exuberantly fertile in allegorical thought, and shall it be judged a thing improbable that in his imaginative youth, having recently passed through a very grand and rude transition of experience, he should have strained the plasticity of a favourite craft to body forth the symbolic expression of thoughts too deep for common speech? As the course of investigation into the variety and unity of this composite Jewel brings it more and more home to the creative mind of Alfred, the conviction rises that this work represents no passing freak of artistic fancy, nor the fond elaboration of some fascinating idea (as in a sonnet); but rather that we have before us the thoughtful record of a period of life and a phase of some duration, containing serious reflections by one who had reached a higher stage of observation, a stage commanding a wider outlook. Of some such a crisis as this the Alfred Jewel appears to be the pictorial and symbolic monument. And if this impression is sound, it ought to help us to some further conclusions. We ought with this help to be able to form some estimate of the period in which this Jewel was designed. However we may lament the poverty of detailed incident in the life of Alfred, we are not ignorant of its main divisions. And we are now in a position to ask—To which of these divisions does this carefully elaborated design most naturally belong?