It is always a pleasing occupation to follow out the associations of human fancy which often invest persons and places with an interest, and indeed a romantic charm, to which the cold-eyed historian or dryasdust critic is entirely unresponsive, and if Winchester as it first appeared to us, as we looked down from the brow of St. Giles’s Hill, seemed to throb with the life and interest of a departed age, and of historical personages long since passed away, so too we shall find that it possesses associations of the purely literary type, not indeed fit to challenge comparison with the glorious pageantry of its historic past which we have attempted, all too inadequately, to present upon our stage, but not unworthy to be chronicled and to be included in her volume of romance and recollection. Her points of contact with literature have been many, and yet it would be wrong to describe her as a literary city. No poet of note, no great writer, has, in recent days at all events, claimed her as parent; her acquaintance has been rather with literary persons than with literature itself, for though she has attracted many to make her in some form or other their theme, but little of real weight in any but ancient literature has first seen the light beneath her auspices. For all this she has, in literature as in life, her story to tell, and that an ancient one. The first literary associations of Winchester are, as is but natural, historical ones, and the first mention of her in literature is found in Bede, who records for us, among other scanty details, her name, ‘Venta, quae a gente Saxonum Ventanceastir appellatur’; she next appears in a full flood of glory, the seat of the learned and literary court of Alfred, from which he gave the world the treasures of his literary efforts--the _Consolations_ of Boëthius, Gregory’s _Pastoral Care_, Orosius, and Bede’s _Ecclesiastical History_, all rendered into the vernacular, and more important far than all of these, the great thesaurus of early national history, the _English Chronicle_, the history of which we have already related, and from which we have quoted so constantly in our earlier chapters, to be followed by the equally momentous Domesday Book--curious as it may seem to include this among literary productions. Following from this we have a wide and almost bewildering series of chroniclers, historians, and annalists, some of whom, like William of Malmesbury, Henry Knighton, and Matthew Paris, record details of her career incidentally as general items in the history of the land, while others, like Precentor Wulfstan and the annalists of Ealden Mynstre and Newan Mynstre, laboured at Winchester in their respective scriptoria, producing not merely wonderful works like the _Benedictional_ of St. Æthelwold and the _Golden Book_ of Edgar, but local histories in goodly store, the Hyde _Liber Vitae_ and _Liber de Hyda_, and the later monkish annals of Plantagenet days--Rudborne’s