A.D. 871.] VIRTUES OP ALFRED. 205 ject to piles, under which he painfully laboured for many years, insomuch that he despaired even of life. How king Alfred woe cured of one distemper andfell into another still more severe. At a certain time, when by divine instinct he came into Cornwall to hunt, he turned aside to a certain church where St. Gueriir and St. Neot used to dwell, and there he remained a long while prostrate in silent prayer, beseeching God of his mercy that the severity of his distemper might be exchanged for some lighter infirmity, yet so that it might not appear outwardly in his body lest he should be despised by men. Having ended his prayer, he proceeded on his journey, and not long after, according to his petition, he was, by divine grace, entirely delivered from that distemper and restored to perfect soundness. But that infirmity being removed, he was attacked by another much more severe, a nuptial affection, which troubled him incessantly from the twentieth year of his age to the forty-fifth. In this storm of trials he had sons and daughters born to him of his beforementioned queen Alswitha, in the order following:—his eldest daughter was named Alfleda, who, when she arrived at a marriageable age, was united to Ethelred, earl of the Mercians ; next, a son was born to him named Edward, who governed the realm of England after his father ; in the third place a daughter was born to him named Ethelgiva, who bound herself by the rules of monastic discipline and assumed the religious habit. Alfred and Edward, who were brought up in the king's court, studiously learned the psalms and Saxon writings. Ethelwald, the youngest of all, through the care of his father, applied himself to literature, to which he was entirely devoted before he had attained sufficient strength to engage in the affairs and businesses of men. Of the virtues and wisdom of the great king Alfred. Amidst the dangers of war and the impediments which ever attend this present life, amidst continual infirmities of body and the ravages of the pagans, king Alfred began to set in order the affairs of his kingdom, to exercise every sportsman-like art, to instruct his goldsmiths and artificers, his falconers and hawkers ; by his wisdom he constructed