Lion symbolism in great art. How they degenerate into the British
door knocker, I leave you to determine for yourselves, with such
assistances as I may be able to suggest to you in my next lecture;
but, as the grotesqueness of human history plans it, there is actually
a connection between that last degradation of the Leonine symbol, and
its first and noblest significance.

You see there are letters round this golden Lion of Alfred's
spelling-book, which his princess friend was likely enough to spell
for him. They are two Latin hexameters:--

Hic Leo, surgendo, portas confregit Averni
Qui nunquam dormit, nusquam dormitat, in ævum.
(This Lion, rising, burst the gates of Death:
This, who sleeps not, nor shall sleep, for ever.)

Now here is the Christian change of the Heraclean conquest of Death
into Christ's Resurrection. Samson's bearing away the gates of Gaza is
another like symbol, and to the mind of Alfred, taught, whether by
the Pope Leo for his schoolmaster, or by the great-granddaughter of
Charlemagne for his schoolmistress, it represented, as it did to all
the intelligence of Christendom, Christ in His own first and last,
Alpha and Omega, description of Himself,--

"I am He that liveth and was dead, and behold I am alive for evermore,
and _have the keys_ of Hell and of Death." And in His servant St.
John's description of Him--

"Who is the Faithful Witness and the First-begotten of the dead, and
the Prince of the kings of the earth."