event that King Alfred, in his translation, thus abridged the detail:— “Alaric, the most Christian and the mildest of kings, sacked Rome with so little violence, that he ordered no man should be slain, and that nothing should be taken away or injured that was in the churches. Soon after that, on the third day, they went out of the city of their own accord. There was not a single house burnt by their order.” In translating and adapting this book to the uses of his time, King Alfred did not trouble himself at all with its old ecclesiastical character, as what Pope Gelasius I. had called a book written “with wonderful brevity against heathen perversions.” Looking to it exclusively as a digest of historical and geographical information, Alfred abridged, omitted, imitated, added, with a single regard to his purpose of producing a text-book of that class of knowledge. Omitting the end of the fifth book and the beginning of the sixth, and so running two books into one, he made the next and last book the sixth instead of the seventh, as it is in the original. The “History of Orosius” itself is bald, confused; but it was enriched and improved by Alfred’s addition to the first book of much new matter, enlarging knowledge of the geography of Europe, which he calls Germania, north of the Rhine and Danube. Alfred adds also to the same book geographical narratives taken from the lips of two travellers. One was Ohthere, a Norwegian, who sailed from Halgoland, on the coast of Norway, round the North Cape into the Cwen-Sæ, or White Sea, and entered the mouth of the river Dwina, the voyage ending where there is now Archangel, the most northern of the Russian seaports. Ohthere afterwards made a second voyage from Halgoland along the west and south coast of Norway to the Bay of Christiania, and Sciringeshæl, the port of Skerin, or Skien, near the entrance of the Christiania fjord. He then sailed southward, and reached in five days the Danish port æt Hæđum, the capital town called Sleswic by the Saxons, but by the Danes Haithaby. The other traveller was Wulfstan, who sailed in the Baltic, from Slesvig in Denmark to Frische Haff within the Gulf of Danzig, reaching the Drausen Sea by Elbing. These voyages were taken from the travellers’ own lips. Of Wulfstan’s, the narrative passes at one time into the form of direct personal narration—“Wulfstan said that he went . . . that he had . . . And then we had on our left the land of the Burgundians [Bornholmians], who had their own king. After the land of the Burgundians we had on our left,” &c. The narrative of the other voyage opens with the sentence, “Ohthere told his lord, King Alfred.” These three additions to “Orosius”—the Description of Europe, the two voyages of Ohthere, and the voyage of Wulfstan—may be considered Alfred’s own works.