books of that age, a statement which has been erroneously interpreted as importing that all his progress in the art of writing consisted merely in these ineffectual essays. It can scarcely be doubted, from other circumstances, that he was familiar with this art. The greatest service, however, which Charlemagne rendered to learning, was his munificent patronage of its professors, and the readiness and zeal with which he lent himself to various schemes for its restoration and diffusion. The University of Paris, as is well known, sprang from a seminary which he established in his palace (hence called the Palatine school), and in the institution of which his principal adviser and assistant was our countryman, the able and accomplished Alcuin. This school was opened about the year 780, while its projector was yet in the very midst of his wars. While letters, long forgotten both in courts and general society, were thus enjoying the protection of Charlemagne in the West, the famous Haroun Al Raschid (or the Just), whose name the Arabian Nights' Entertainments have made so familiar to every reader, and whose extensive dominions entitled him to be regarded as Emperor of the East, was affording them equal encouragement in that quarter of the globe. Haroun was himself, indeed, an excellent poet, and distinguished for his proficiency in various branches of learning. But at this time the Moors were very considerably a-head of the nations of Christendom in civilization and the knowledge of the arts. The two great potentates we have mentioned, between whom so large a portion of the earth was divided, are recorded to have corresponded with each other; and in the year 807 an ambassador from the Caliph arrived in France, bringing with him various presents for Charlemagne. Among these was a clepsydra, or water-clock, which excited especial admiration, as a contrivance beyond

anything which ingenuity had yet invented in Europe. Another of Haroun's presents was a set of chess-men, some of which are still preserved in the Royal Library at Paris. Charlemagne reigned from the year 768 to 814, when he died at the age of seventy-one; and Haroun Al Raschid died at the age of forty-seven in 809, after a reign of twenty-three years.

But our own ALFRED, whose extraordinary attainments in learning, made in the latter portion of a short and very busy life, we have already briefly noticed,* sheds a much brighter glory over the ninth century, than Charlemagne and the Caliph Haroun do over the eighth. Alfred was born in the year 849, succeeded to the crown in 871, and his reign extended to the close of the century. Even the unusual lateness of the period at which his acquaintance with books commenced, was but the least of the untoward circumstances with which this wonderful man had to contend in his pursuit of knowledge. Born, as he was, the son of a king, how scanty were the means of education of which he had it in his power to avail himself, compared with those which, in our happier days, are within the reach of the poorest peasant! In that age it demanded the price of a goodly estate to purchase a book; and in England, especially, teachers were so scarce, that Alfred, so long as he continued merely a prince dependent upon his father or his elder brothers, actually seems to have been without the requisite resources to procure their services. Nothing, as his biographer, Asser, informs us, was a more frequent subject of regret with him, than that, during the only time of his life when he had either health or leisure for study, he had thus been left utterly without the means of obtaining instruction. For as soon almost as he had passed his boyhood, he was obliged to engage in active duty as a soldier; and the incessant toils of a military life, in the course

of which he is recorded to have fought no fewer than fifty battles, as well as to have undergone a succession of hardships and sufferings, under which an ordinary mind would have broken down in despair, consumed not a few of the best of his succeeding years. And even after he succeeded to the throne, when we consider that, in addition to the extensive literary labours which he accomplished, he not only attended to his multifarious public duties with a punctuality that has never been surpassed, but, notwithstanding his harassing bodily ailments, signalized himself by his prowess and dexterity in every manly exercise, we may well ask by what mysterious art did he find time for all this variety of occupation! The answer is, that he found time by never losing it. Time is the only gift or commodity of which every man who lives has just the same share. The passing day is exactly of the same dimensions to each of us, and by no contrivance, can any one of us extend its duration by so much as a minute or a second. It is not like a sum of moncy, which we can employ in trade, or put out to interest, and thereby add to or multiply its amount. Its amount is unalterable. We cannot make it breed;' we cannot even keep it by us. Whether we will or no, we must spend it; and all our power over it, therefore, consists in the manner in which it is spent. Part with it we must; but we may give it either for something, or for nothing. Its mode of escaping from us, however, being very subtle and silent, we are exceedingly apt, because we do not feel it passing out of our hands like so much told coin, to forget that we are parting with it at all; and thus, from mere heedlessness, the precious possession is allowed to flow away as if it were a thing of no value. The first and principal rule, therefore, in regard to the economising and right employment of time, is to habituate ourselves to watch it. Alfred knew this

well; and we may here relate the method he adopted to measure the passing hours, in his want of those more artificial time-pieces which we possess. Having made his chaplains, as Asser in his simple narrative informs us, procure the necessary quantity of wax, he ordered six candles to be prepared, each of twelve inches long, which he had found would together burn for four and twenty hours. Having marked the inches on them, therefore, he ordered that they should be lighted in succession, and each three inches that were consumed he considered as recording the flight of an hour. 'But finding,' continues the historian, 'that the candles burned away more quickly at one time than at another, on account of the rushing violence of the winds, which sometimes would blow night and day without intermission, through the doors and windows, the numerous chinks in the walls, or the slender covering of the tents, he bethought him how he might prevent this inconvenience, and having contrived artfully and wisely, he ordered that a lanthorn should be fairly fashioned of wood and horn; for white horn, when scraped thin, allows The canthe light to pass through even like glass. dle, therefore, being placed in the lanthorn, thus wonderfully constructed, as we have said, of wood and horn, was both protected from the wind, and shone during the night as luminously without as within.' Every heart will acknowledge that there is something not a little interesting, and even touching, in these homely details, which paint to us so graphically the poor accommodations of every kind in the midst of which Alfred had to pursue his studies, and the humble matters with which his great mind was often obliged to occupy itself in contriving the means of gratifying its noble aspirations. This illustrious man, indeed, seems almost to have lifted himself quite above the tyranny of circumstances;

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realizing, in the most disadvantageous, nearly all that could be expected or desired in the most favourable. The difficulties with which he had to contend, in truth, formed the very soil out of which no small portion of his greatness grew. Among kings he is not only the Great, but the very greatest. If we look merely to his zeal and services in behalf of literature, it is impossible to name any royal personage that can be compared with him, either in classic antiquity or in modern times. A genuine love for letters, and a proficiency in them, in the possessor of a throne, is worthy of our admiration, in whatever age or country the phenomenon may be recorded to have been witnessed; because it must always be considered as a striking example of a triumph over seductions that are generally, of all others, found the most difficult to resist, and have, accordingly, been of all others the most seldom resisted. But of the other learned kings of whom we read in history, some were literary in a li terary age; others, naturally unfitted for the more active duties of their station, took to philosophy, or pedantry, as a refuge from insignificance; some had caught the love and the habit of study before they had mounted a throne, or had dreamed of mounting one; above all, most, if not all of them, had been carefully educated and trained to letters in their youth. But it is told only of Alfred, that, without an example to look to, without even the advantages of the very scantiest education, in an unlearned age, and a still more unlearned country, he, who had been only a soldier from his youth upwards, withdrew himself of his own accord from the rude and merely sensual enjoyments of all his predecessors and all his contemporaries, to devote himself to intellectual pursuits, and to seek to intertwine with the martial laurels that already bound his brow, the more honourable wreath of literary distinction.