Say they falsely

Wolfstan
Who name you thus? Look inward ere you speak.
William. There is a bitter taunting in your words,—

Have you no comfort for a tortured man,

Whose soul is sick to death, and needs your help;

Not that you sting him with those maddening eyes!

Wolfstan. What! you'd have soothing words to clear your path To heaven, as heralds to your kingly state?

Think, king! now reft of crown! Think, bloody man,

Of what a naked grovelling thing you are!

And ask no pardon till you've purchased peace.

William. I have enriched our holy mother church,

With wealth so vast that gold fills every shrine.

Wolfstan. Blasphemous gold, that fills the shrine with curses. William. There's not a plain in all our English realm

But shall be studded with majestic towers,

To watch upon its peace. Chantries shall rise

In every dell; I've poured my guarded wealth

In a rich flood, at shrine of every saint

Whoe'er drew English breath.

Wolfstan.

They'll spurn the wealth

Wrung from their country's blood. Have you no thought

Of sins no gold can cover? Life fleets fast

From you-from me-this meeting is our last,

From a lone cottage in a forest dell,

And lust and murder held their revelry.

William. I would that Forest ne'er had stretched its bounds,

Nor trenched upon the homes of living men.

Wolfstan. Have you forgot that pleasant eve in June,

When your array burst in with jubilant cries

On the small circle, cleared from bush and tree,

Where stood a cottage near a babbling brook ?

William. There were so many-and I fired them all.

Wolfstan. But this the blackest of your deeds of shame.
When rose from his stone bench beside the door
A grey haired man, and held his withered hands
To pray for pity, and with faltering voice
Claimed for his own the land where he was born,
Where all his fathers lived, from Alfred's days,—
With a brief nod you cut his pleadings short,
And a fierce Norman murderer earned your thanks,

By pityless stabs in that old grandsire's breast.
Then from the cottage rushed a maiden forth,
As if the bursting flames had leapt to shape,
And clothed an angel in their blinding glow,
So bright, so dazzling in her beautiful fear,
That there was pause among the murderous crew,—
Till with a cry she saw her grandsire slain,
And fell, a white insensate form of snow,
Prone on his breast, till all the oozing blood
Dabbled her stainless robes and sunbright hair.
Then-William,-Conqueror,-tyrant,-fiend of hell!
What then?-You still have memory of that time?

William. Pardon-oh! pardon-let me die in silence.
Wolfstan. No-the last sound that fills your failing ear
Shall be my voice. Your hapless victim died,
By heaven's great gift, unconscious of her wrong,
Spotless in soul, and by her corpse I knelt,
Lifting my hands in the great eye of heaven,
And swore to be revenged. Day after day
In my lone cell I've thought upon that oath,
And nearer, nearer my revenge approached.
I heard it coming in the silent hours;
I felt its breath upon me as I lay

In lonely vigils. And my sister's voice,

Her's-that lone girl's-was mingled with its words.
We are alone, oh! King-

Wolfstan. No! 'Tis for this I've waited; here we stand
In presence, as we stood, a stripling I,

You a great king, gorged with success and blood;
You spurned me, you denied the pity I claimed.

Once more we are together, a foul thing,

Hated, deserted, lonely, powerless, you-
I, the relentless angel of your doom!
Unpitied, unforgiven, unconfessed,
Hopeless, despairing you descend to dust;
And I, that in this hand can lift the blessing
Of Holy Church, and shrive you of your sins,
That in this palm carry the peace of heaven-
William. Oh! pardon-priest, or leave me.
Fall on my head!

Wolfstan.

Let that peace

I clutch my fingers thus,
And keep that blessing in my sinewy grasp.
See! my shut fingers doom you to despair.

William. Is there no hope? give but one little sign,
My eyes are failing, spread your pardoning fingers,—

I shudder at your close shut hand.—

SCENE THIRD.

[Dies.

Burial Ground at Caen. A Coffin lying beside an open Grave.

Enter Friar Eustace and four Peasants.

Friar. Death sheds no holiness around this man,

They say the dead man was a murderer.

Friar. He was the mightiest Conqueror earth e'er saw,

And ruled the greatest kingdoms of the world.

Peasant. Howbeit he was a murderer I've heard tell

And little good his conquests do him now.

Friar. The Holy Abbot promised to be here

At noon-to bless the grave. Draw near, my friends,
And lift the bier.

Down in the dell,-see how in snaky folds

It coils around the hamlet, pushing forth

A lapping tongue of flame from roof and window.

Peasant. "Tis truth he speaks, there's fire o'er all the town.

[An alarum bell is rung.

Asselyn. Aye, ring the alarum, 'tis a jubilee day, And flames are but the ministers of heaven,

To purify the air from so much woe,

As this foul murderer brings,-burst forth, ye fires,
Upsent from the abyss, to write his name

In scorching ruin on the blackened sky!

Come vultures, sit upon his breast and croon

Your songs of rapine! Leave the bloated corpse
To waste into the elements, nor stain

Earth's bosom with its noisome pestilence.

Fly for your dwellings burn,-roof, wall, and floor,
You cannot quench them, not if all the blood
Shed by this Conqueror, gushed in one full tide
Mid the hot embers.

And gaze upon the dead?

Friar.

May I lift the lid

[Exeunt Peasants.

The bell tolls continually.

No-back a space,—
[The reflection of the flame is seen.
Here comes the Abbot-scarce his holy words
Can reach us mid the clamours of that bell.

Abbot. Quick! brother Eustace, into sacred earth

Lay the deserted body of the king.

Death has assoiled him of the darkening crimes,

That barred the Church's blessing while he breathed.

Asselyn. Stop! I command you. Here I plant my foot

On soil that was my own,-it held my cradle,

It held my fathers' graves; but swollen in pride,
The man you'd bury, dashed me from my home,
Seized my rich fields, and raised this hallowed fane
As if in mockery on my ravaged land.

I claim it-I debar you from the grave,

Till Justice makes it his, and his heaped treasures
Ransom the soil from Asselyn and his line.

Abbot. This is no time for bargain and for sale,
Let dust, I pray, return to dust in peace,
And take this purse in quittance of your claim.

Asselyn. 'Tis but these narrow feet of burial soil
I quit for this poor coin. These fields are mine,
These upland levels-these ancestral trees,
Are Asselyn's again !-Unwept, unhonoured,
Sink a forgotten thing into the ground,
Where once your step was proudest.—
Friends, proceed.

Abbot.

After long tempest let him rest at last,

And Heaven in mercy look upon his sins.

[They put the coffin hurriedly into the grave and disperse.

42.-CHARACTER OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR.

From the Penny Cyclopædia.'

The character of the Conqueror has been graphically sketched by the Saxon chronicler from personal knowledge-For we looked on him,' says the writer, ' and some while lived in his herd (on his hirede).' The feature that had chiefly impressed itself upon this close observer was what he calls his starkness, by which he seems to mean his unbending strength of will and firmness or tenacity of purpose. Three times in the course of his description he remarks this. But while he was stark beyond all measure, and very savage to those who withstood him, the honest chronicler states, on the other hand, that he was mild to good men who loved God, and that he was a very wise man, as well as very rich, and more worthful and strong than any of his ancestors. William indeed was far from being all devil, any more than his father (Robert le Diable), whom he seems to have a good deal resembled, and who was complimented by his contemporaries with the epithet of the Magnificent, as well as with the other expressive surname by which he is commonly remembered. With all his ferocity, William evinced throughout his life a reverence both for the ordinances and the ministers of religion; and, although he would not suffer either his clergy or the pope to erect within his kingdom an ecclesiastical dominion separate from and independent of that of the crown, he showed himself anxious on all occasions to maintain the respectability of the church by promoting able men to the chief places in it, as well as by upholding it in its legal rights and powers. That he was eminently endowed with the qualities, both moral and intellectual, that raise men above their fellows, is abundantly proved by what he did. Few men have projected the influence of their genius across so wide an expanse both of time and space as the founder of the Norman dynasty in England. In moral disposition William was passionate and ruthless; but he does not appear to have been vindictive, nor even, properly speaking, cruel or bloodthirsty, notwithstanding the destructive character of some of his military operations. There was nothing weak, nothing little about this great king. In his latter

as if

days, the chronicler intimates, he fell into the vices of avarice and greediness; but this love of money was only one of the forms assumed by his love of power, the natural passion of all superior minds. So one of the forms in which the energy and ardour of his character were displayed was his passion for the chace. "So much he loved the high-deer (hea deor),' naïvely writes the Saxon annalist, he had been their father. It is plain indeed that the deer and other ferae naturae . had quite as much of his affection as his children, and somewhat more than his subjects. He made laws,' says the chronicler, 'that whosoever should slay hart or hind, him man should blind. As he forbade the slaying of harts, so also did he of boars. He also decreed about hares, that they should go free.'

The principal portion of the laws of the Conqueror that has come down to us consists of a capitulary which is said to have been drawn up and agreed upon in an assembly of the principal persons of the realm whom he called together about the year 1070. It is for the most part a selection of the laws previously in force in the Saxon times, according to their last general revision by Canute the Great. It exists both in Latin and in Romance, or old French; and the Latin version, which is preserved in the history attributed to Ingulphus, has usually been reckoned the original; but Sir Francis Palgrave, who has printed both versions from better manuscripts than had been before employed, in his 'Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth,' Proofs and Illustrations, lxxxviii.-civ., has advanced some reasons for believing that these laws of the Conqueror were most probably originally written in Latin, which was the language in which legal documents were commonly drawn up in England for some ages after this date. The common statement that William attempted to abolish the English tongue and to substitute the French, whether in the courts of law or in the ordinary intercourse of life, rests upon no good authority, and is irreconcilable with well-ascertained facts.

The wife of William the Conqueror was Matilda, daughter of Baldwin V., Earl of Flanders, surnamed the Gentle He married her before he acquired the crown of England, and she died 2nd November, 1083. Their children were, Robert, whom his father called Gambaron (Roundlegs) and Courthose (Shorthose), who died a prisoner in the castle of Cardiff in 1134; Richard, who was gored to death by a stag in the New Forest; William, by whom he was succeeded on the English throne; Henry, who succeeded William; Cecilia, who became abbess of the monastery of the Holy Trinity at Caen, and died there 13th July, 1126; Constance, who was married to Alan, Earl of Bretagne and Richmond, but died without issue; Adeliza, who died young before the Conquest; Adela, who married Stephen, Earl of Blois, by whom she became the mother of Stephen, king of England, and who afterwards took the veil, and died in the nunnery of Mareigny in France about 1137; Gundred, who married William de Warrenne, Earl of Surrey, and died in childbed at Castleacre in Norfolk, 27th May, 1085; and Agatha, who was contracted to Alphonso, king of Leon and Castile, but died before her marriage. He had also a natural son, William de Peveril, by Maud, daughter of Ingelric, a Saxon nobleman, who afterwards married Ranulph de Peveril.

William Rufus, on his road to England, had been apprised of his father's death, at the port of Wissant, near Calais. He hastened to Winchester, where the royal treasure was deposited, and gaining over William de Pont-de-l'Arche, the keeper of the treasury, by his promises, he got possession of the bags. He had it carefully