This is so completely familiar to the student of antiquity, that I shall not multiply examples: they may be found in Bartholinus. But one instance I may be excused for citing, inasmuch as it proves how long the heathen spirit survived despite the peaceful hope and promise of Christianity. Henry of Huntingdon, in the sixth book of his history, relates of Sigeweard the great duke of Northumberland, that hearing of the loss of his son in battle, he exclaimed, “Recepitne vulnus lethale in anteriori vel posteriori corporis parte? Dixerunt nuntii: In anteriori. At ille: Gaudeo plane, non enim alio me, vel filium meum digner funere.” In 1055 however, oppressed with sickness, he found that his desire was not to be fulfilled. “Siwardus, consul rigidissimus, profluvio ventris ductus, mortem sensit imminere, dixitque: Quantus pudor me tot in bellis mori non potuisse, ut vaccarum morti cum dedecore reservarer! Induite me saltem lorica mea impenetrabili, praecingite gladio, sublimate galea: scutum in laeva, securim auratam mihi ponite in dextra, ut militum fortissimus modo militis moriar. Dixerat, et, ut dixerat, armatus honorifice spiritum exhalavit.” Through every word of this passage breathes the old heathen spirit of Haralldr Hilditavn, and one feels that to Christianity alone it was owing, that Sigeweard did not prevent an inglorious by a voluntary violent death. ----- For the perjurer and the secret murderer Nástrond existed, a place of torment and punishment—the strand of the dead—filled with foulness, peopled with poisonous serpents, dark, cold, and gloomy: the kingdom of Hel was _Hades_, the invisible, the world of shadows[725]: Nástrond was what we call _Hell_. Christianity however admitted no goddess of death, and when it was thought necessary to express the idea of a place of punishment after death, the Anglosaxon united the realm of Hel with Nástrond to complete a hideous prison for the guilty: the prevailing idea in the infernal regions of the Teuton is cold and gloom[726]; the poisonous snakes, which waking or sleeping seem ever to have haunted the Anglosaxon, formed a convenient point of junction between his own traditional hell and that which he heard of from the pulpit, in quotations from the works of the Fathers; and to these and their influence alone can it be attributed when we find flames and sulphur, and all the hideous apparatus of Judaic tradition, adopted by him. In this fact seems to me to lie a very important mark of ancient heathendom, and one which the clergy themselves admitted, a belief in which they shared, and which they did not scruple to impress upon their flocks, even in spite of the contrary tendency of their authorities: it will be sufficient to refer to the description given of hell in the poetic Salomon and Saturn, a composition redolent of heathendom: on the defeat of the rebel angels, it is said, God