manhood--had shared his sports and pastimes--dined at the same table with him when, without friend or companion, except his brother Alfred, he landed a stranger upon the shores of Normandy;--all such as had clung to him, and assisted him while he was in exile, now came over to congratulate their old acquaintance who had so suddenly emerged from his obscurity, and become, by the voice of the whole Saxon nation, and the tacit consent of the overawed and powerless Danes, the undisputed monarch of England. Edward, on the other hand, landed in his native country almost a stranger; he brought with him foreign habits, foreign manners, and even spake the Norman-French more fluently than the plain Saxon tongue of his ancestors. He was but a child when he left England, and nearly thirty years residence in a foreign court must have caused his native language to have sounded harshly on his ears when he again landed on the shores of Britain. With the exception of those who accompanied him, England would seem like a strange country; he found none there whose habits and tastes were congenial to his own, none with whom he had interchanged the warm friendship which is natural to youth; and he must instinctively have shunned the advances made to him by earl Godwin, standing suspected, as he did, of having indirectly contributed to the death of his brother Alfred, or, at the least, of having deserted him in the night, and left him in the hands of the Danes. Either Edward must have stood far aloof from such suspicion, or, when he consented to marry the daughter of Godwin, have purchased the crown of England by making a sacrifice of his feelings and of his honour. Edward's mother, it will also be remembered, was a Norman, and while the friends of her son poured into the English court, she herself was followed by those who claimed kindred with her race, until even the very language of the Norman usurped that of the Saxon.