“But a little light!— And on it falls the shadow of the priest; Heaven yield us more! _for better Woden, all Our cancell’d warrior-gods, our grim Walhalla, Eternal war, than that the Saints at peace; The Holiest of our Holiest one should be This William’s fellow-tricksters_; better die Than credit this, for death is death, or else Lifts us beyond the lie.” Which is heathenism and atheism beautifully combined. He goes on, still in his atheistic vein, when Edith bids him listen to the nightingales: “Their anthems of no church, how sweet they are! Nor kingly priest, nor priestly king to cross Their billings ere they nest.” And again, when Gurth brings news of the pope’s favoring William’s cause, Harold laughs and says of it: “This was old human laughter in old Rome Before a Pope was born, when that which reign’d Call’d itself God—a kingly rendering Of 'Render unto Cæsar.’” Harold must have lately risen from a perusal of Mr. Gladstone’s pamphlet on _Vaticanism_ when he spoke thus, so we pardon his aberration. That pamphlet is too strong for weak intellects. “The Lord was God and came as man—the Pope Is man and comes as God,” he continues, still in the Gladstonian vein. He reminds Edith that love “remains beyond all chances and all churches”—a dictum and doctrine that would be strange even in a Protestant Harold. “I ever hated monks,” he says in another place, which may account for his having founded Waltham Abbey. He grows more and more Protestant towards the end, and the saintly relics over which he was so terrified at having sworn a false oath he terms the “gilded ark of mummy-saints.” And here is his final legacy to England: “... And this to England, My legacy of war against the Pope From child to child, from Pope to Pope, from age to age, Till the sea wash her level with her shores, Or till the Pope be Christ’s.”