2. In order that his subjects might have some knowledge of the history of that great and splendid Roman past which lay in ruins behind them, Alfred, always with the help of his ecclesiastic friends, translated the seven books of the _History of Paulus Orosius against the Pagans_. The selection was in many respects an excellent one, for Orosius, a Spanish ecclesiastic of the fifth century and a friend of St. Augustine, has here set forth, in a concise manner and fairly interesting style, all that his contemporaries knew of the history of the world from the building of Babylon to Alaric’s capture of Rome. He was credulous and inaccurate, and his work, except for the events of his own age, has no scientific value, but as a manual of ancient history for the young Anglo-Saxon nobleman it could hardly have been surpassed. Both Alfred, however, and his readers must have been somewhat unnecessarily depressed by its perusal; for as the book had a polemical bearing, _adversus Paganos_, and was intended to show that the calamities which were befalling the Roman empire in the fifth century were not due to its adoption of the Christian faith, its author was naturally led to exaggerate the misery of the world in preceding ages. While enumerating, therefore, all the murders, pestilences and earthquakes of which he could find mention in the 5,617 years that had elapsed since the creation of the world, he omits to notice the long interspaces of quiet happiness which there had been in some ages and some countries of the world, and he has no praise for the progress which Humanity had made in some departments of life from Sardanapalus to Constantine. King Alfred and his teachers were evidently sometimes at a loss to understand the meaning of their author, and it is amusing to see the ingenious arts by which in such cases they evaded the difficulty. They decided, no doubt wisely, that the unabridged history would be too long for their Saxon students, and therefore practised severe compression. Unfortunately for us this compression applies much more to the later portions of the history, where Orosius’s testimony is valuable, and where his translators might have added something of importance, than to the earlier books where neither he nor they have anything to say that we care to hear. The long account of Cæsar’s campaign in Gaul is reduced within the limits of a single sentence, and even the story of his British campaigns is shortened, though here we derive from the translation the fact that in Alfred’s opinion the site of Cæsar’s third battle was “near the river that is called Thames, near the ford that is called Wallingford”.