HKB
THE REIGN OF EDGAR.
"The royal letters are a thing of course; A king, that would, might recommend his horse, And deans, no doubt, and chapters with one voice, As bound in duty, would confirm the choice. Behold your bishop! well he plays his part, Christian in name, and infidel in heart."--COWPER.
Over the reign of Edgar, who ascended the throne in his sixteenth year, the shadow of Dunstan again falls, and those who had rent the kingdom asunder, and placed him, when a mere boy, upon the throne of Mercia, kept a more tenacious hold of the crown as its circle widened, and gathered closer round Edgar as they saw his power increased. Dunstan had by this time risen to the dignity of bishop of London. The infamous Odo had died about the close of the reign of Edwin, and, weakened as the power of that unfortunate king was, he had spirit enough to appoint another to the primacy of England. The bishop that Edwin had nominated perished in the snow while crossing the Alps; for the pontiffs had issued a decree that no one should be established in the dignity of archbishop till he had first visited Rome, and received the pallium; which, as we have before described, was a tippet made of the whitest and purest of lamb's wool, chequered with purple crosses, and worn over the shoulders. Another bishop was appointed in his place, but he was soon compelled to resign the primacy, the objections raised against him being, that he was modest, humble, and of a gentle temper--virtues which, although they form the very basis of the Christian character, but ill accorded with the views of the ambitious churchmen who now surrounded the throne of the young king. In 960, only a year after the accession of Edgar, Dunstan, although he held the sees of Winchester, Worcester, Rochester, and London, was appointed archbishop of Canterbury, and received the pallium from the hand of Pope John the Twelfth, at Rome. Dunstan lost no time in promoting the interests of those who had assisted in raising him to his new dignity. He appointed Oswald, a relation of Odo, to the bishopric of Worcester; and Ethelwold, with whom he had been educated in his early years, he made bishop of Winchester. They also, by the intercession of Dunstan, became the king's councillors. By this means, he had ever those who were his sworn friends and servants at the elbow of the sovereign. That he contributed to the spreading of education and to the encouragement of the fine arts will ever redound to the credit of Dunstan; while the supernatural gifts to which he laid claim--the vision of his mother's marriage with the Saviour--the song which, he said, the angel taught him, and with which he roused every monk in the monastery, at morning light, to learn--we must, in charity, attribute to that temporary insanity to which he was at times subject, and which did not even pass unnoticed by his contemporaries.
Nearly the first act of the primate appears to have been the establishment of the Benedictine rules in the monasteries; for the severe and rigid tenets which were adhered to by this new order of monks appear to have suited the cold, stony nature of the new archbishop, the warm emotions of whose heart had now died out, and faded into that cold, ashy grey, which, having lost all sympathy with the living and breathing world, lies as if dead and in a grave, while the heartless body still lives and acts.