which Satan and his host were condemned,
Satan harangued: "He was erst God's angel,
fair in Heaven, until his mind urged, and
pride most of all, that he would not revere
the word of the Lord of Hosts. His thought
boiled within his heart, his punishment was
hot without him, and he said: This narrow
place is not unlike that other we knew, high
in Heaven's kingdom, which my master
bestowed on me, though we must cede it now to
the All-Powerful. Yet hath he not done
rightly to strike us down to the abyss, bereave
us of Heaven's kingdom, and decree to people
it with men. That is to me the chief of
sorrows, that Adam, who was wrought of
earth, should possess my strong seat,—that it
should be delight to him while we endure
our torment in this hell. Oh! had I power of
my hands, and might for one season be
without, one winter's space, then with this
host I——. But around me lie the iron
bonds, and this chain pinches me."

The Apocryphal story of Judith is the
subject of one other extant poem of the
Anglo-Saxons. As to the manner of the
verse, it consists, as a rule, of short, accented,
unrhymed couplets, bound together by
alliteration. In the first line of a couplet two
words begin with the same letter, and then
in the second line of the couplet the first
word of importance should begin also with
that letter, in this fashion—

                    For forty days
                    The flood shall last,
                    The roofed ark riding
                    Raised afloat.

As to its character, there was a very noticeable
feature in the literature of the British
Anglo-Saxons. They brought Beowulf and
their war-songs with them. Here they begot
a moral and religious literature in their verse,
and a prose literature that, when it was not
moral and contemplative, was steadily
designed to make useful knowledge popular.
Bede and their other prose writers were
encyclopædists. They gathered from recondite
books the knowledge of the day upon all
subjects, and condensed the pith of it into
summaries distinct and practical. It is not
only a fact that they did this, but it is a fact
that they stand out from among all rude
nations by so doing. Nowhere else is there
a literature bred out of barbarous times, so
moral, so earnest, and so business-like. Bede
lived a scholar's life in the north of England
eleven or twelve hundred years ago, in the
monastery of Saint Peter's at Wearmouth.
He collected the pith of the Fathers from
their writings, for elucidation of the Holy
Scriptures. He wrote on grammar, arithmetic,
music, astronomy, the history of his
country, trying to give the gist of everything
and that not in a dry way. King Alfred,
not content with clear treatises in Latin,
promoted to his utmost the diffusion of good
knowledge in the vulgar tongue. The same
Anglo-Saxon temper, which, to come home
for an illustration, we may say begets in
these days publications like that which the
reader now has between his fingers, and
connects the period of their issue with the return
of a just relish for Anglo-Saxon English, is
to be found strongly defined among our
Anglo-Saxon forefathers even in the first
days of their possession of the soil. Alcuin
went out of Yorkshire to enlighten Charlemagne,
and it was he, an Anglo-Saxon, who
restored letters in France.

John Erigena, an Anglo-Saxon and by birth
an Irish Scot, who probably was among the
first of lecturers at Oxford, was, in the ninth
century, a choice friend and guide to Charles
the Bald, then a great patron of letters. He
was a merry scholar, and on good terms with
his royal friend. "Pray," asked his Majesty
once, when he and Erigena sat opposite each
other at dinner, talking in Latin dialectics,
"Pray, what divides a Scot from a sot?"
John retorted, "Nothing but the table."
There is another dinner-table story of
division told about him. He, a little, thin, and
nimble man, was placed between two corpulent
monks, and the dish before them contained
three fishes, one large and the others
small. The king bade him divide fairly with
his neighbours, whereupon he gave each of
the fat men one of the sprats and put the
whale on his own plate. "You have not
made that division equal, learned master,"
said King Charles. "Truly, I have," said
the philosopher. "There are three men and
three fishes: there is a big one and a little
one, there is another big one and a little one;
and here is a big one and a little one. The
scale is just."

AUSTRALIAN JIM WALKER.

THIS name was avowedly an alias, but Jim
always evaded any attempt to discover his
real patronymic, which I have no doubt he
had wilfully buried in oblivion, lest he should
reflect disgrace on his family. I know that
he never wrote to, nor received letters from,
them. He told me once that he wished his
friends to think him dead; and I have reason
to believe that on more than one occasion he
refused to notice advertisements in colonial
papers, calling on him, by his true name, to
communicate with them.

Jim's history—as I gleaned from him one
day, when a trifling act of kindness had opened
his heart—was a sad, but common one. He
was the child of very respectable parents.
The captain of the vessel in which he came
out offered to take him back on credit; but
Jim's pride forbade his acceptance of this
kindly offer: he feared to be taunted with
non-success; "and," said he, "I'd have died
rather than suffer that."

And, indeed, he seemed likely enough to die.
A few occasional shillings were picked up by
splitting wood for fuel; but often he dined