varieties of belief and disbelief, has ever been found brooding over the Teutonic mind, and enduing the contemplative, often gloomy intellect of the North, with its highest modes of imagination; while the pious meditations of the French lady are woven over the framework of a refined sentimentality, which, under other inspiration, might have afforded garniture for a novel of Balzac or George Sand. The earthly love and tenderness for friends, brother, home, and nature, in which Eugénie's soul was steeped, mingled with and led on to her devout life-consecration to a Higher Power. She felt the sense of bliss to consist in close-confiding trust and self-abnegation; and for the full contentment of such yearnings as hers, she could find no satisfying object save such as dogmatic Christian doctrine afforded her. She knew no impulse for questioning or searching into the grounds of things. Her gentle marvel at life's mysteries was easily quelled by the dictates of faith; and she was content to accept her Church's view of what religion is, and to see beauty in all its forms, though, with her innate purity and elevation of soul, it was its spirit and not its form to which she really clung. Those portions of Mlle. de Guérin's writings which do not derive their whole interest from the self-communings of her faith and love, charm us chiefly by the minute and graphic touches of life and nature with which they abound. But in her small details there is no attempt at philosophy or generalization, no quickness to probe, no restless desire to remedy the evils of a world immersed in sin and error. She writes of the things and persons around her with the taste and discrimination, but also with something of the gossiping minuteness of a De Sevigné. And her personal appearance, slight, pale, fragile, insignificant but for dark intelligent eyes and a bright smile which sometimes illumined the pensiveness of her countenance,-how different is this too from the outward aspect which we have heard ascribed to the English lady philosopher. Family affections and a sense of duty kept Eugénie de Guérin in the world, but natural inclination would have consigned her to a cloister. Miss Cornwallis, as we have had occasion to remark, was repelled from the amenities of social intercourse by the angularity of her own. nature, by dislike of notoriety as a "learned lady," and by the want of natural objects for her softer affections; certainly not from the sense that the soul's perfection could best be attained by recluse meditation. On this subject hear her emphatic protest against the pietism of Wilberforce :-- "Wilberforce mistook his road (led away by the speciousness of the religious party he attached himself to), and strove to 'meditate' when he ought to have thought. He wasted precious time in writing down good resolutions and self-reproaches for doing less than he ought, yet seems to have overlooked the fact that all his writing and meditation was the cause of his doing little. Thought, happily for us, is very rapid; and if we were really determined to think when we ought to do so, with the full powers of our reason, five minutes would generally despatch the business, and well too; for the mind, already well stored with knowledge and accustomed to close application, can bring its powers to bear on any given subject at a moment's notice with thorough effect. To set apart hours for thinking is mere indolence, and has much the same effect on the mind that a diet of weak broth would have on the body: it enfeebles and unfits it for any vigorous effort. At fifty-two, Wilberforce complains that his memory is failing. He himself attributes it to having suffered his thoughts to be too desultory, and I have no doubt he was right; his water-gruel 'meditations' had taken from him the power of grasping rapidly and firmly the objects brought before him; for I have invariably seen among my acquaintance that the powers of the mind failed the earliest in those who applied the least."-P. 197. The And here our remarks draw to an end. It so happens that the three clever women with whose memorials we have been occupying ourselves, take up their position respectively in the three departments into which the genius of ages and the genius of individuals are said to be alike distributable. Poetry, Narrative, and Philosophy or Science, have been by turns the favourite forms of human thought since men began to think. In the present century they would seem to have each come in for their share in giving the prevalent direction to the public taste. quality of imagination was certainly predominant in the days to which Joanna Baillie properly belonged, the days of the great minstrels of Scott, Byron, Campbell, Southey. It was at History's shrine that Lucy Aikin paid her devotions, in company with, at however respectful a distance, Hallam, Mackintosh, and Sismondi. Philosophy claimed Caroline Cornwallis as her own,—the critical philosophy which the new impulses of the time had brought from the German universities, and which is making its familiar home in the minds of the present generation. All honour be to the triad! They had neither of them cause to be ashamed of the place assigned to their productions on the shelves of contemporary literature. With whatever differences of taste or ability, they each in their several way helped to vindicate woman's right to the franchise of the human intellect, and have afforded man opportunity to show that the old days of jealousy and derisive compliment are at an end, and that the pretensions of a précieuse ridicule would be as unmeaning in this latter half of the nineteenth century as were the fantastic pedantries of La Mancha's knight among the workingday realities of the age of Cervantes. ART. IV.-1. Det Norske Folks Historie. P. A. MUNCH. Vols. i. ii. iii. Christiania, 1852-55. 2. Den Danske Erobring af England og Normandiet. J. J. A. WORSAAE. Copenhagen, Gyldendalske Boghhandling, 1863. 3. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Edited by BENJAMIN THORPE, for the Master of the Rolls. London, Longmans, 1861. .2 vols. 4. Lives of Edward the Confessor. for the Master of the Rolls. Edited by H. R. LUARD, M.A., THE reign of Edward the Confessor in England was really the rule of Earl Godwin and his sons. The foundations of the fortune of that family had been laid in exile. Already, in the year 1009, in the reign of Ethelred the Unready, Brihtric, the brother of the arch-traitor Edric Streon, had slandered Wulfnoth the "Child," a noble Thane of the South Saxons, to his weak-minded master; and that too at the very moment when a mighty fleet was gathered together to meet a threatened invasion of the Danes. The result was that Wulfnoth went into banishment, with twenty ships, and wasted the south coast as he went. Brihtric sailed after him with 180 ships, and boasted that he would bring the traitor back quick or dead; but a great storm arose, the ships were dashed against each other, and driven on shore in a shattered state. Then Wulfnoth fell on them, and burned Brihtric's ships. When the news came to the King, he and his "witan were reft of counsel. They were all as unready" as their lord; and the end of that great armament was that every man went to his home, and England was as defenceless as ever, when Thorkell the Tall came with his "huge hostile host," after Lammas-tide, to revenge his brother Sigvald's death, who had fallen in the massacre of St. Brice's Day. But we have to deal with Wulfnoth rather than Ethelred and his evil counsel. The noble " Child" went into exile, and took with him his son Godwin, then probably a boy. We hear little more of the father. His name, which together with those of the false brothers Brihtric and Edric, is before found in Anglo-Saxon charters, appears no more; but it is probable that he threw in his lot with King Sweyn Forkbeard and his mighty son Canute, with whom Earl Godwin, or Godwinus Dux, soon rose to high rank. As early as the year 1018, we find him signing Canute's 1 It is clear, from the unfailing evidence of contemporary deeds, that whatever might have been the father's fate, the son returned and was reconciled to Ethelred, for in the will of Athelstan Atheling occurs the following passage:" And I grant to Godwin Wulfnod's son the land at Compton, which his father before had;" and in all likelihood he is the "Godwin minister" who signs several of Ethelred's later charters. But from the very outset of Canute's reign there can be no doubt of Godwin's power. 2 A VOL. XLII.-NO. LXXXIV. charters; and the year after, when Canute, having laid all England under his feet, and being firmly seated on the Danish throne by the death of his brother Harold, made an expedition to Jomsborg, on the east coast of the Baltic, Godwin, at the head of a band of English troops, so distinguished himself that the English were ever afterwards held by Canute as good as the Danes, and their young leader was rewarded by the hand of Githa, the King's cousin, and sister of Ulf Jarl, who had married Astritha, the great King's sister. All through Canute's reign his Saxon favourite kept his love,1 and at his death, in 1035, we find Godwin and his friends standing by Emma and her son Hardicanute, rather than by Harold Harefoot, Canute's 1 The writer of the most interesting contemporary life of Edward the Confessor-first printed by Mr. Luard for the Master of the Rolls,—a man who well knew the King, as well as Earl Godwin and his sons and daughter-thus describes Earl Godwin's character and position in Canute's reign :-" This Godwin, as he was wary in counsel, so also in warlike matters had he been proved by the King as most valiant. Besides, for the evenness of his temper, he was in the greatest favour with every one as well as the King; a man matchless for the constancy with which he girded himself to work, and accessible to all, with a cheerful and ready good-will. But when certain sufficient affairs of state had recalled the King to his own nation-for in his absence some had thrown off his yoke and made them ready to rebellionGodwin clung to him on his whole journey as his constant companion. Here the King had more opportunity of observing, in the example of this great chief, his foresight, his endurance of toil, and his skill in warfare. He saw also how deep-seated was his gift of speech, and felt, if he could bind such a man to himself more closely by some fitting gift, what a gain it would be to him in governing his newly won kingdom of England. Having proved him, therefore, a little longer, he made him one of his councillors and gave him his cousin to wife. Whence, too, when he returned to England, having set all things on a right footing in his Danish kingdom, he (Godwin) is made by the King an earl, dux, and the King's spokesman (bajulus), or president of the Council. Nor when he had attained so great a dignity was he puffed up, but to all good men, to the best of his ability, proved himself a father; for he did not now throw off that gentleness of spirit which he had learned from his boyhood up, but cultivated it as a natural gift, by continually practising it both to his inferiors and his equals. Whosoever did wrong, from him what was lawful and right was instantly exacted. For which reason he was looked on by all the sons of his country in the light of a father rather than a lord. From such a sire, sons and daughters were born not unworthy of their origin, for they were remarkable as inheriting both their father's and their mother's honesty, and in bringing them up Godwin paid special attention to instructing them in those arts, by which he prepared in these his children, both a bulwark and a delight to the nation. So long as the aforesaid King Canute reigned, he, Godwin, flourished in his Court as first among the great chiefs of the kingdom, and by reason of his fairness, all agreed in thinking, that what he was for writing should be written, what he was for cancelling should be cancelled." There can be no doubt, from the precedence given to Godwin in almost all Canute's charters, that he was in the highest rank. In a very little while after Canute's conquest of the kingdom, we find him signing and continuing to sign next after the King, and that before Earl Eric, Earl Hacon, the sons of Earl Hacon of Norway, and also before Earl Ulf, the King's cousin and brother-in-law. son by a Saxon concubine, and thus espousing the Danish rather than the Saxon side. But when Hardicanute loitered in Denmark, and lost time in settling his quarrel with Magnus of Norway, the Danish Thingmannalid the Varangians of the Danish dynasty in England-had their way. From the first they had sided with Harold, who was on the spot, rather than with his brother, who was abroad. They thought that if a crown was worth having it was worth seeking, and as they went England went. Hardicanute's party lost ground. Emma was banished to Flanders by her rival's son, and Godwin went over to Harold's side. But before she went, if we may believe one MS. of the Saxon Chronicle,1 Godwin had done a deed of blood which was noteworthy even in that bloody age. In the year 1036, "the harmless Atheling" Alfred, Ethelred's elder son by Emma, tried to make his way to his mother at Winchester, but Earl Godwin, according to this MS., "would not suffer it, nor other men, who had great power in this land; for the voice of the people was then much for Harold, though it was unrightful. But Godwin hindered him and threw him into prison, and his followers he scattered, and some cruelly killed. . . . Never was a bloodier deed done in this land since the Danes came and here took up free quarters." It is remarkable that this foul deed is laid to 1 This is Cotton. Tib. B. i. Cotton. Tib. B. iv. leaves out Godwin's name altogether, and imputes the crime to Harold Harefoot. 66 2 Thorpe, in his edition of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, has here made a ridiculous mistranslation. The Saxon words are "her frid namon," which he renders "here made peace." That the Danes came into England to make peace, or that they made it when here, is startling in itself, and much more so coming after the story of such a deed of blood. But the words mean nothing of the kind. They correspond exactly to "free quarters,"—a place where they could store up their booty in peace, holding it with a strong hand against all comers; where they could, in short, have an asylum. But, alas, there are many mistakes in this edition. We shall find another when we speak of the said Godwin's career. Take another, just before this story of the harmless Atheling. When Canute died, one of the Ms. of the Chronicle, Laud. Bodl. 636, says, 'ba lidsmen on Lunden gecuron Harold," which Mr. Thorpe translates "the lithsmen of London chose Harold," adding, in a note to "lithsmen," "sailors, from lid, a ship." Now it so happens that these "lidsmen" do not come from lid, a ship, nor were they sailors, nor were they sailors of London. They were the soldiers of the " Thingmannalid," whose quarters were in London. We shall have to speak of them more at length. Again, having thus mistaken the meaning of the word "lidsmen," a little farther on he finds the word "huscarl," in the passage where the same MS. says, that Emma-Elfgifu, Canute's widow, sat at Winchester "mid þæs cynges huscarlum hyra suna," with the king's housecarles, her sons; here Mr. Thorpe has another note to "huscarlum," as follows: " The Danish bodyguard, though retained till the time of the Conquest." But here again he is quite wrong. The king's housecarles were the king's private body-guard, the rank and file, as it were, of his "hird," "hired" or comitatus. They were in no sense a national militia or condottieri, as the Thingmannalid were. This is plain from many passages in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle |