Not content with honouring the murdered archbishop with a monument, he resolved that the body should be placed in the abbey which had witnessed the services of so pious a primate; so he demanded the body of the bishop from the inhabitants of London, who had purchased it from the Danes, and buried it in their own city. The Londoners, however, refused to deliver it up; when the Dane, mingling the old habits of the sea-king with his devotions, put on his helmet and breastpiece, placed himself at the head of his troops, carried off the coffin by force, and, between two long lines of his armed soldiers, that were drawn up on each side of the street which led from the church to the Thames, had the dead body of the archbishop borne to the war-ship, which stood ready to receive it. There is something of magnificence in such an act of barbarous veneration as this, which was accomplished without either injury or bloodshed; and we can imagine that in every corner of the London of that day, nothing was talked of but the daring piety of Canute, which had led him to carry off the body of their reputed saint; that public opinion would be divided in the motives it attributed to such an act; that little groups would assemble at the corners of the streets, and that long after twilight had settled down upon the old city, their conversation would still be about Canute and his soldiers, and the enormous war-ship, with its gilt figure-head, that resembled a dragon, and the dead bishop it would carry away; then the city-gates would be closed, and over all would reign the ancient midnight silence and darkness, while the dragon-headed ship and the Danes went slowly down the silver Thames, freighted with the king, and the coffin, and the murdered man. There appears, at a first glance, something incongruous in such an act as that of Canute's carrying off the dead body of the bishop by force, when it was done with the intent of making a favourable impression upon the Saxons; yet we must not forget the stout resistance made by the capital in the defence of Edmund, which the Danish king seems also to have borne in mind, when he exacted from the city the sum of eleven thousand pounds. Canute seems to have been a man in whom the elements of refinement and barbarism, which our ancient writers love to dwell upon in their moral masks, were oddly blended; he was one who believed that cruelty was necessary in the administration of justice, but looked with horror upon a deed that was committed without the pale of this shadowy boundary.