such arts and fine arts as there were; Svein's very ships, they say,
had their gold dragons, top-mast pennons, and other metallic splendors
generally wrought for them in England. "Unexampled prosperity" in the
manufacture way not unknown there, it would seem! But co-existing
with such spiritual bankruptcy as was also unexampled, one would hope.
Read Lupus (Wulfstan), Archbishop of York's amazing _Sermon_ on the
subject,[8] addressed to contemporary audiences; setting forth such a
state of things,--sons selling their fathers, mothers, and sisters as
Slaves to the Danish robber; themselves living in debauchery,
blusterous gluttony, and depravity; the details of which are well-nigh
incredible, though clearly stated as things generally known,--the
humor of these poor wretches sunk to a state of what we may call
greasy desperation, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." The
manner in which they treated their own English nuns, if young,
good-looking, and captive to the Danes; buying them on a kind of
brutish or subter-brutish "Greatest Happiness Principle" (for the
moment), and by a Joint-Stock arrangement, far transcends all human
speech or imagination, and awakens in one the momentary red-hot
thought, The Danes have served you right, ye accursed! The so-called
soldiers, one finds, made not the least fight anywhere; could make
none, led and guided as they were, and the "Generals" often enough
traitors, always ignorant, and blockheads, were in the habit, when
expressly commanded to fight, of taking physic, and declaring that
nature was incapable of castor-oil and battle both at once. This
ought to be explained a little to the modern English and their
War-Secretaries, who undertake the conduct of armies. The undeniable
fact is, defeat on defeat was the constant fate of the English; during
these forty years not one battle in which they were not beaten. No
gleam of victory or real resistance till the noble Edmund Ironside
(whom it is always strange to me how such an Ethelred could produce