Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/427

 But as yet the darkest times that men had known were the four years during which the sons of the English Church were left as sheep without a shepherd.

The shepherd was at last to come, like his immediate predecessor, in one sense from a distant land, in another sense from a land which was only too near. The house of Bec, the house of Herlwin, was for the second time to give a patriarch to the isle of Britain. It had given us Lanfranc the statesman; it was now to give us Anselm the saint. We may reckon it, not as the shame, but as the glory of our nation that we have so often won strangers, and even conquerors, to become our national leaders, and to take their place among the noblest worthies of the soil. Alongside of the lawgiver from Denmark, of the deliverer from France, we rank, as holding the same place among bishops which they hold among kings and earls, the holy man from the Prætorian Augusta. The annals of the eleventh and twelfth centuries are thick set with the names of foreign prelates holding English sees; and among them both Normandy and Lorraine, to say nothing of Pavia, had sent us some whom we might well be glad to welcome. But the two whose names shine out above them all, the two from whose names all thought of their foreign birth passes away, the two whom we hail as our own by adoption and love, came from a more distant realm, and a realm which is well nigh forgotten. Hugh of Avalon and of Lincoln came from the more favoured and famous district where the Imperial Burgundy rises to the Alps and sinks