...l ages, the recital of whose deeds flushed our cheeks in boyhood. He looks as Charlemagne may have done that summer morning in the good year of our Lord 778, when he heard of the chivalric death of Roland and his whole corps in the gloomy defiles of the Roncesvalles; or as Alfred the Great, of England, that beautiful May morning when leading his troops at Ethandune; or as William the Norman, when he g...