change, and with them the resources of the mission. Anschar was now able to make considerable presents to King Horik of Denmark, which was a favourite method with him of breaking down opposition to the truth. Moreover, in the conduct of some diplomatic business with which he was entrusted at the court of the Danish monarch, he so won upon his confidence and respect, that Horik declared he would have to do with no other negotiator in his transactions with the neighbouring empire. The violent Diocletian was not, it is true, softened into a Constantine, but he now readily gave his sanction to the propagation of Christianity within his dominions, and Anschar was allowed to erect a church at Hadeby. Many of the Danes were baptized, and the movement thus begun slowly but surely gathered strength, until, under our own Canute, no pagan reaction was any more to be feared. Anschar's influence with King Horik was also of great service to the Swedish mission, to which we must now accompany the Apostle of the North. The royal Dane sent with him an envoy to the court of King Olof, to say that he was well acquainted with this servant of God, who came to him as an ambassador from the German Emperor Ludwig. Never in all his life, he added, had he seen so good a man, nor found one so worthy of confidence. Having found him to be a man of such singular goodness, he had himself, he said, let him order everything as he chose in regard to Christianity. Accordingly he begged King Olof to allow him in like manner to arrange everything as he pleased for the introduction of Christianity into his own kingdom, for that he would do nothing but what was good and right. A more striking instance than this of the importance of a Christian bishop's having a good report of them that are without, is, perhaps, not to be found in history. Anschar arrived at Birka in the very midst of a crisis in which he required such powerful intercession. A national champion of the faith of Odin, maddened to the highest pitch of fanaticism by the progress of Christianity, had just arisen. This man announced himself to the Swedes as a messenger from the gods, to make known their wrath at the neglect into which their worship had fallen, and at the honours. rendered to a foreign divinity. If they wanted a new god, the heathen prophet said, they should build a temple to Ericht, one of their ancient kings. The fiery speeches of the Norse Porphyry told powerfully upon the people, his suggestion was adopted with acclamation, and this pagan revival was at its height in the moment at which Anschar landed at Birka. The native Christians, alarmed for his life, implored him to retreat, but he had counted the cost and steadfastly refused. Yet, although eager, as we have seen, for the martyr's crown, and prepared, as he told the trembling converts, to face any amount and form of torture, he would not neglect prudent precautions. He invited King Olof to a banquet, and soothed him, as was his wont, with presents. Having thus conciliated the Swedish monarch's good will, he personally pressed the request contained in King Horik's letter, that he might be allowed to preach the Christian faith. The king was not himself averse from granting it, but since his authority was limited he could only promise to convoke the Folkthing or popular legislative assembly, and himself to support the proposal after consulting the gods by lot. In the interval Anschar gave himself to prayer, and whilst engaged in celebrating the mass, felt so strong a faith as to the result that he said to a priest who stood by him at the altar, "I am now sure of my cause; grace will be with them." Nor was his joyful anticipation disappointed. The decisive day dawned. The matter was first laid by the king before his nobles, who demanded an appeal to the will of the gods by lot. It was favourable to the admission of the new religion. The king now, according to his pledge, put the question to the Folkthing. When the debate waxed warm, an eventful turn was given to it by a very old man, who rose in the midst of this Swedish parliament and said, "Hear me, king and people; many of us, no doubt, have already learned that this God can be of help to those who trust in Him; for many of us here have had experience of it in dangers at sea, and in manifold straits. Why, then, should we spurn what is necessary and useful to us? Once, several of us travelled, for the sake of this religion, to Dorstede, and there embraced it uninvited. At present the seas have become dangerous by piracy. Why, then, should we not embrace what we once felt constrained to seek in distant parts, now that it is offered at our own doors?" He carried the assembly with him, and the promulgation of the Gospel was thus legalized throughout Gothland. In Sweden Proper also a similar decision was shortly afterwards come to, and Erimbert, a priest, was despatched to forward the movement in that quarter. Anschar erected a church on a site given by the king, and purchased another himself for a parsonage-house. After completing these establishments, and leaving behind him a number of his associate ecclesiastics to carry on the work of evangelization, he returned to his diocese in A. D. 854. During the remainder of his lifetime the pious and ardent missionary archbishop watched with sleepless solicitude over the welfare of the infant Scandinavian churches, and in his last sickness he wrote to the emperor and to the German bishops to commend them to their faith and zeal. He died in his sixty-fifth year, on the festival of the Purification of the Virgin, February 3rd, A.D. 865, with the words on his lips, "Lord, be merciful to me a sinner! Into Thy hands I commend my spirit." When the sick, who from distant parts were wont to seek his prayers, showed any inclination to speak of their subsequent recovery as miracles, the humble man would say, "Could I deem myself worthy of such a favour from the Lord, I would pray him to vouchsafe me but this one miracle-that out of me he would make a good man." That prayer was heard; and pagans owned in him, as we see in the instance of King Horik, the awfulness of goodness. That Christians should have acknowledged it also is less surprising; but towards their inconsistencies it sometimes manifested itself in a form of keen rebuke, impossible to withstand. Thus, on one occasion, when he heard of some of the baptized magnates of his diocese who were guilty of the enormity of kidnapping some fugitive Christian slaves, and forcing them into their service, he went straightway into their midst, and shamed them into the liberation of the captives. He had no other arms than those of the Spirit; and the might of these weapons, which is so strikingly displayed in this incident, is the pregnant moral of Anschar's entire history, and is the key to all his triumphs as the Apostle of the North. III. THE OLD MULBERRY GARDEN AND THE MODERN ST. JAMES'S PARK. BY WALTER THORNBURY. TIME, who is a harlequín, famous for his tricks and changes, seems to treat London as the scene of a pantomime that takes a great many centuries playing, but still must come to the green-curtain drop at last. Wonderful are the changes and tricks he effects, telling the gentlemen of the stage, whether clown or king, the proper time for their entrance and their exit. His scenes are on a large scale, and they flap and slide about just like the scenes of the pantomime of my simile-(this cold weather it is impossible to keep metaphors quite congruous). Now a king's London palace, at a slap of his wand, becomes a hospital; now a gallow's green becomes a fashionable street. Perhaps Harlequin Time wills it that now a Niagara sausagemachine roar in the cellar where Mrs. Brownrigg murdered her apprentice. Now that a coal-wharf shall take the place of the Norman castle that once frowned upon the banks of the crystal Thames, the "silver-footed Thamesis," whose strand the poet Herrick, exiled to his rough Devonshire vicarage, longed to repace, or "reiterate," as he somewhat fantastically calls it. The harlequin Time, with his changeful wand ever vibrating over our dear black-faced, changeful, dirty, delightful city, has played, and is still playing, strange tricks. There was the little, swift, crystal streamlet, the Fleet-swallow swift and fleet-chasing, ripple after ripple, from its hilly source in some Hampstead meadow, is now a vaulted-up, loathsome, poison-breathing sewer, full of rats and odours, that are so strong they run about in visible shapes, and is no more fit to be seen than a charnel-house, or a plague-pit newly covered. The little fairy nymph of that Fleet stream has long since died an Ophelia death, and lies buried forty fathoms' deep in this fat and stagnant Styx of subterranean London—a sad type of all the bright youth and childhood that has grown old, and wicked, and festering, bad, and has died, and corrupted away, in this our wicked old London. The Fleet seems to me if I may be allowed to draw a simile from a book I love much-the unhappy Little Nell of rivers; the Babe in the Wood, killed by its naughty uncles, the nightmen of London. Shall I stay to trace its decline, as it thickened and darkened like a painter's glass, when he washes his Indian-ink brush? Shall I tell how it flowed under the cruel thieves' haunts of the bad cocked-hat time-the heartless, false, artificial time—when, through bloody trap-doors and secret apertures, often by moon glimpses at the dead of night, stabbed and battered bodies were splashed into its waters by masked highwaymen and blaspheming wretches, with pistols still smoking, sticking from their huge flapped pockets. This is Change No. 1. Change No. 2.-Lincoln's Inn Fields, where the Duke of Ancaster and other of Horace Walpole's grand, patched, and periwigged, false, fribbly friends lived, with sprinkle of judges and great men (brain great, not pocket great)-fading to the stony row of silent chambers of 1860where the grimy laundress sweeps the foot-marked door-steps, and where sparse grass grows between the bald white stones of the courtyards. Change No. 3 of my sample changes; taken at random. The site of the National Gallery, in the Middle Ages the King's Mews; where, in grassy plots, the dandelion balanced its hollow globe of down, like a floral acrobat, with one trick, or spread its yellow shield flower, while the white falcons of Norway fluttered and whistled on the gloved hand of some lucky accident that wore the regal coronet, and strutted like a deity got down from its pedestal. Change 4.-The silent and blocked-up warehouses, where chains dangle, and custom-house cats collect revenues of mice, and hops smell sweet, and hay spreads about-dry memorial of summer fields-and bales of spices tell stories to each other at night of Ceylon cinnamongroves and Malabar jungles-stand now where once the Globe Theatre stood, where for the first time the great Elizabethan men sat and wondered at the magic world unrolled before them by that short prick-bearded man, who sat on the stage among the smoking gallants and their pages. But I might go on all day, showing the pantomimic changes of harlequin Time; showing how London has eaten up all the green fields round it, and spread like a gangrene, killing and deadening as it spread. I could show how the rich citizens' houses of middle-age London are now chandlers' shops in small alleys, and that where Jane Shore, with her jewelled hair, sat and waited for the king, is now—— but I must get at once to my special change-the change of the old Mulberry Garden of Charles into the modern Buckingham Palace; the change of St. James's Park from the swampy meadow walled in by Henry VIII., to the trim modern triangle where the children play, the ducks strut, the swans pout, and the cows stand so patiently to be milked; where once fat Prior and black-browed Swift walked together, to better, not the English constitution, but their own. It is delightful even now going down the tumultuous Strand-to pace which Dr. Johnson thought the glory of existence, and the whole Duty of Man; to pass the pert statue of Charles I., with the honeycombed pedestal; and to thread through those iron Horse Guard gates, under the infallible clock; and between those mirrors of knighthood, the two horse-guards, who seem always so bran new, so veneered, so brushed, so Windsor-soaped, so killing, so fatal, if not to their enemies --who they never meet-certainly to the Carlton Terrace nurse-maids, who regard them as demigods and Achilleses-as probably they are, if Paris were to be again troublesome. I still like to pace the hard clean walks that border the lipping water, where the yellow puffs of ducklings scull about, and where the frowning swans spread all their canvas to the blue June air-just as some chiding monitor of time-some dull mechanic sexton of the day-knells for the bygone hour over Westminster way, and announces, with the indifference of a herald, the coronation of a new king of sixty minutes. I like the barrack sidewalk, where you hear the drum noisily vibrant, reminiscent of Waterloos, or of many Vittorias. I like the open breezier palace-end, where the fountain sows rainbows, and the once royal home, so unhealthy, as Leigh Hunt will have it, raises its wealthy but unmeaning bulk. I like to look at the hideous monster of Mr. John Nash, architect the place that bluff old William IV. would not inhabit, and that, tinkered up from time to time, was originally nothing but a cheating enlargement of the old Buckingham House, by that heartless, cunning fellow, George IV., who thus intended to trick Parliament into building a new palace. I remember, without even the intelligent aid of Mr. Peter Cunningham-whom so many old writers have aided— that this was originally a house built for Dryden's Duke of Buckingham; that it was again rebuilt and sold to George II., when a "pouting" Absolom; that then George IV. played his tricks with it; and so, with some modifications and enlargements, it now stands scaring the sun and frightening the moon-a very hideous modification of the wattled cabin of the early British chief. I like, too, the centre walks, where the little Benjamins of London play, and cry, and babble, and where seedy meditators, and out-of-doors and sometimes out-of-elbow philosophers think and doze, then wake, and doze, and think; where the thin nervous, fine-fibred grass struggles for a living, and where the pampered swans steer past with their orange feet. Here, too, sometimes seated between an oily farmer up for the "show," who rubs his red face with a silk mainsail, and a gentlemanly vagabond, who tells me he has been in the "Rifles," and who looks rather like a rifler-I sometimes, in a day-dream, find myself asking the farmer who that swarthy man in the dove-coloured velvet and cloth-of-gold sword-belt is, who stands just opposite, throwing showers of dry hemp-seed to the ducks. "I see now't-sartin I don't," says the farmer. |