Alfred, both to father and mother, was the best beloved of their children. On his mother's death, his father sent him, being then five years old, with a great retinue through France and across the Alps to Rome; and there the Pope anointed him King, (heir-apparent to the English throne), at the request of his father.
Think of it, you travellers through the Alps by tunnels, that you may go to balls at Rome or hells at Monaco. Here is another manner of journey, another goal for it, appointed for your little king. At twelve, he was already the best hunter among the Saxon youths. Be sure he could sit his horse at five. Fancy the child, with his keen genius, and holy heart, riding with his Saxon chiefs beside him, by the Alpine flowers under Velan or Sempione, and down among the olives to Pavia, to Perugia, to Rome; there, like the little fabled Virgin, ascending the Temple steps, and consecrated to be King of England by the great Leo, Leo of the Leonine city, the saviour of Rome from the Saracen.
Two years afterwards, he rode again to Rome beside his father; the West Saxon king bringing presents to the Pope, a crown of pure gold weighing four pounds, a sword adorned with pure gold, two golden images,[27] four Saxon silver dishes; and giving a gift of gold to all the Roman clergy and nobles,[28] and of silver to the people.
No idle sacrifices or symbols, these gifts of courtesy! The Saxon King rebuilt on the highest hill that is bathed by Tiber, the Saxon street and school, the Borgo,[29] of whose miraculously arrested burning Raphael's fresco preserves the story to this day. And further he obtained from Leo the liberty of all Saxon men from bonds in penance;—a first phase this of Magna Charta, obtained more honourably, from a more honourable person, than that document, by which Englishmen of this day, suppose they live, move, and have being.
How far into Alfred's soul, at seven years old, sank any true image of what Rome was, and had been; of what her Lion Lord was, who had saved her from the Saracen, and her Lion Lord had been, who had saved her from the Hun; and what this Spiritual Dominion was, and was to be, which could make and unmake kings, and save nations, and put armies to flight; I leave those to say, who have learned to reverence childhood. This, at least, is sure, that the days of Alfred were bound each to each, not only by their natural piety, but by the actual presence and appeal to his heart, of all that was then in the world most noble, beautiful, and strong against Death.
In this living Book of God he had learned to read, thus early; and with perhaps nobler ambition than of getting the prize of a gilded psalm-book at his mother's knee, as you are commonly told of him. What sort of psalm-book it was, however, you may see from this leaf in my hand. For, as his father and he returned from Rome that year, they stayed again at the Court of Charlemagne's grandson, whose daughter, the Princess Judith, Ethelwolf was wooing for Queen of England, (not queen-consort, merely, but crowned queen, of authority equal to his own.) From whom Alfred was like enough to have had a reading lesson or two out of her father's Bible; and like enough, the little prince, to have stayed her hand at this bright leaf of it, the Lion-leaf, bearing the symbol of the Lion of the tribe of Judah.
You cannot, of course, see anything but the glittering from where you sit; nor even if you afterwards look at it near, will you find a figure the least admirable or impressive to you. It is not like Landseer's Lions in Trafalgar Square; nor like Tenniel's in 'Punch'; still less like the real ones in Regent's Park. Neither do I show it you as admirable in any respect of art, other than that of skilfullest illumination. I show it you, as the most interesting Gothic type of the imagination of Lion; which, after the Roman Eagle, possessed the minds of all European warriors; until, as they themselves grew selfish and cruel, the symbols which at first meant heaven-sent victory, or the strength and presence of some Divine spirit, became to them only the signs of their own pride or rage: the victor raven of Corvus sinks into the shamed falcon of Marmion, and the lion-heartedness which gave the glory and the peace of the gods to Leonidas, casts the glory and the might of kinghood to the dust before Chalus.[30]
That death, 6th April, 1199, ended the advance of England begun by Alfred, under the pure law of Religious Imagination. She began, already, in the thirteenth century, to be decoratively, instead of vitally, religious. The history of the Religious Imagination expressed between Alfred's time and that of Cœur de Lion, in this symbol of the Lion only, has material in it rather for all my seven lectures than for the closing section of one; but I must briefly specify to you the main sections of it. I will keep clear of my favourite number seven, and ask you to recollect the meaning of only Five, Mythic Lions.
First of all, in Greek art, remember to keep yourselves clear about the difference between the Lion and the Gorgon.