"ALFRED THE GREAT"
[To the Editor of Tim SPECTATOR.] Sia,—I am greatly obliged to the reviewer of my little Alfred the Great in your issue of April 10th. That your readers will obtain from him a reliable impression of the book is doubtful, but I admit that he has caught me out neatly on the Chester episode of 894, and I can only plead that I do not know how the mistake came to be made. Anyway, a reviewer with so formidable and ready a knowledge of the period demands respect; may I surmise that an extensive work on Alfred is sooner or later to come from Mr. Bryson's pen ?
I wish to thank him also for the additional hints he has supplied On the question of Alfred's after-fame, or lack of it ; and may I (again) gently surmise that he feels a little sore at my amateurish incursion into a region and a theme which he has evidently studied with anticipatory care ? Such a reviewer, as I say, demands great respect, however ineirllessly microscopic may be his analysis of the book lie reviews: I am Willing to-confess that I have for many years been too busy inspecting schools (and, in a fashion not followed as a reviewer by Mr. Bryson, always saying the best as well as the worst about each one individually) to have been able to inspect every Alfredian MS. or book ; and in my Essay I have used translations throughout. Yet there Was a time (over 40 years ago, alas !) when I did my four hundred lines of Beowulf, and, but' for a chit of a girl, headed the list in English Honours at London University. But quantum mulatus ! Here am I today urging schools to teach English speech but only able myself to show "naive condescension," according to your reviewer, towards English literature !
But does Mr. Bryson quite realise that a florin book, with explanatory preface forbidden, is a florin book ? He thinks I should have referred to "the standard biography of Plummer," the Parker MS. of the Anglo-Sazon Chronicle, and so on. Actually I have referred three times to Plummet, but the Great Lives series is intended for the populace, and I did not include Plummer in my short bibliography. What agonies of editorial blue-pencilling Mr. Bryson would have had to suffer if he had been chosen to write a book of 140 pages! I plead guilty to many omissions, but I can assure Mr. Bryson that the book was in print some months before it was pub- lished, and that only by a narrow margin of time was I even able to insert a reference to Hodgkin's History of the Anglo-Saxons and thus escape my reviewer's final contempt.
As to my references to the Venerable Bede I am not repent- ant. Bede's colossal and monotonous credulity nauseates me, and I can never. forget his tales of the ineorrupt bodies of saint after saint and his solitary excursion into the original —the horse cured of the stomach-ache by his contact with the soil where King Oswald had fallen. Still, even of Bede I say that his book "takes a high place because of its date and purpose."—Yours, &c., F. H. HAYWARD. 17 Ileatheote Grove, Ching,ford, E. 4.
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