Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/429

 *

Burgundy in which he was born and bred rather than to the Italy which in after days he visited as a stranger. There, in the last home of old Gaulish freedom, in an Augusta named after the first Augustus—an Augusta which we doubt whether to call Prætorian from the conquerors or Salassian from the conquered—in the long valley fenced in by the giant Alps on either side—at the foot of the pass where local belief holds that Hannibal had crossed of old and where Buonaparte was to cross in days to come—there where the square walls of the Roman town rise almost untouched above the rushing Dora—where the street still bearing the name of Anselm leads from the Roman gate to the Roman arch of triumph, where the towers of Saint Gratus and Saint Urse, fellows of kindred towers at Verona and at Lincoln, at Schaffhausen and at Cambridge, rose fresh in all their squareness and sternness when Anselm lay as a babe beneath their shadow—there, among the sublimest works of nature and among some of the most striking works of man, was born the teacher of Normandy, the shepherd of England, the man who dived deeper than any man before him into the most awful mysteries of the faith, but whom we have rather to deal with as one who ranks by adoption among the truest worthies of England, the man