many a time--the tale of that tremendous fortnight which settled the fate
of Britain, and therefore of North America; which decided--just in those
great times when the decision was to be made--whether we should be on a
par with the other civilised nations of Europe, like them the "heirs of
all the ages," with our share not only of Roman Christianity and Roman
centralisation--a member of the great comity of European nations, held
together in one Christian bond by the Pope--but heirs also of Roman
civilisation, Roman literature, Roman Law; and therefore, in due time, of
Greek philosophy and art. No less a question than this, it seems to me,
hung in the balance during that fortnight of autumn, 1066.

Poor old Edward the Confessor, holy, weak, and sad, lay in his new choir
of Westminster--where the wicked ceased from troubling, and the weary
were at rest. The crowned ascetic had left no heir behind. England
seemed as a corpse, to which all the eagles might gather together; and
the South-English, in their utter need, had chosen for their king the
ablest, and it may be the justest, man in Britain--Earl Harold
Godwinsson: himself, like half the upper classes of England then, of the
all-dominant Norse blood; for his mother was a Danish princess. Then out
of Norway, with a mighty host, came Harold Hardraade, taller than all
men, the ideal Viking of his time. Half-brother of the now dead St.
Olaf, severely wounded when he was but fifteen, at Stiklestead, when Olaf
fell, he had warred and plundered on many a coast. He had been away to
Russia to King Jaroslaf; he had been in the Emperor's Varanger guard at
Constantinople--and, it was whispered, had slain a lion there with his
bare hands; he had carved his name and his comrades' in Runic
characters--if you go to Venice you may see them at this day--on the
loins of the great marble lion, which stood in his time not in Venice but
in Athens. And now, king of Norway and conqueror, for the time, of
Denmark, why should he not take England, as Sweyn and Canute took it