For we cannot doubt that when he returned from Rome to England, and witnessed the state of his country—the danger and the depression—he must have experienced a great revulsion of feeling, a strong outburst of regret for the long and happy time that he had been enjoying abroad. His passionate yearning for Rome and his friends there must have amounted to something like a violent fit of home-sickness. All this it was his duty to live down; and to do so he had to look the facts in the face, and take their measure and their bearing, and ascertain their relation to his path of duty, and interpret his position by the light of a religious conscience. Some earnest and ardent minds would find solace and strength in writing poetry, and perhaps Alfred did so. If this Jewel is not the equivalent of such a poem it is nearly akin to it. In constructive art there certainly is a solace of a healing kind, and the Jewel before us answers remarkably to the situation. It is in many particulars like the outcome of such a mood. And if such a mood is likely to have followed the return of the young prince to England, it concerns us to form some opinion about the probable date of that event. It is asserted in the bilingual Chronicle (F) that Alfred returned to England on the occasion of his father’s death, which took place in January, 858; but the statement is discredited by considerations which Mr. Plummer has given in his notes to the _Saxon Chronicle_ (vol. ii, p. 80). Two years later, in 860, his eldest brother, Æthelbald, king of Wessex, died; and this event occasioned a definite call for his return. The three brothers, Æthelbald, Æthered, and Ælfred, held lands in common which were given by their father to these three sons, in such a way that the whole was to come to the latest survivor. This property would now pass to the two brothers, Æthered and Ælfred; and for the sanction of this transfer it was necessary that the parties should appear before the Witan. This transaction is related in Alfred’s Will. The two brothers agreed that their joint property should be held in trust by Æthelbriht, the new king, and that he should farm it for the benefit of his younger brothers, a trust which he fully discharged.