Page:Dickens - A Child s History of England, 1900.djvu/49

Rh English before he started. On the whole, however, he certainly became a far better man when he had no opposition to contend with, and was as great a king as England had known for some time.

The old writers of history relate how that Canute was one day disgusted with his courtiers for their flattery, and how he caused his chair to be set on the seashore, and feigned to command the tide as it came up not to wet the edge of his robe, for the land was his; how the tide came up, of course, without regarding him; and how he then turned to his flatterers, and rebuked them, saying, what was the might of any earthly king, to the might of the Creator, who could say unto the sea, "Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther!" We may learn from this, I think, that a little sense will go a long way in a king; and that courtiers are not easily cured of flattery, nor kings of a liking for it. If the courtiers of Canute had not known, long before, that the king was fond of flattery, they would have known better than to offer it in such large doses. And if they had not known that he was vain of this speech (anything but a wonderful speech it seems to me, if a good child had made it), they would not have been at such great pains to repeat it. I fancy I see them all on the seashore together; the king's chair sinking in the sand; the king in a mighty good-humor with his own wisdom; and the courtiers pretending to be quite stunned by it!

It is not the sea alone that is bidden to go "thus far, and no farther." The great command goes forth to all the kings upon the earth, and went to Canute in the year one thousand and thirty-five, and stretched him dead upon his bed. Beside it, stood his Norman wife. Perhaps, as the king looked his last upon her, he, who had so often thought distrustfully of Normandy, long ago, thought once more of the two exiled Princes in their uncle's court, and of the little favor they could feel for either Danes or Saxons, and of a rising cloud in Normandy that slowly moved towards England.