and more generous unity, and into that unity the Danes themselves, with their love of adventure, and passion for the sea, and keen commercial interests, are at last absorbed.

Some day, perhaps, a religious history of England will be written which will not be an ecclesiastical history. A historian will be found to do for our history what the Lake poets did for Nature when they declared that God was not only transcendent over Nature, but immanent in it. Such an one will take account of the way in which epochs issue in men, and men in turn create epochs. He will perhaps discover that, as the sensitiveness of the plant to the needs of its environment has some relation to its success in the struggle for permanence, so the sensitiveness of the human spirit to the needs of man and the calls of God has something to do with the perpetuation of a man's influence in human history. He will explain why it is that the men who chose to live for eternity are yet the men from whom the ideas, forces, movements, ideals spring which most dominate time. Then we shall understand why it is that there are a few Englishmen who, though buried long ago, are, like Oliver Cromwell, not dead: and among them we shall number with the best Alfred the West Saxon.

Summary of Dates and Events for Reference

(ADAPTED FROM PAULI'S HISTORY)

History is most easily realised when attention is concentrated on the sequence of cause and consequence, personalities and their influences, the rise and decay of institutions and ideas, rather than on dates. For this reason this narrative has been burdened with as few dates as possible. The important dates of Alfred's reign are collected here for those who want them.