faint traditions of the Roman past may have flung their glory round this new “Empire of the English”; a royal standard of purple and gold floated before Eadwine as he rode through the villages; a feather tuft attached to a spear, the Roman tufa, preceded him as he walked through the streets.  The Northumbrian king became in fact supreme over Britain as no king of English blood had been before.  Northward his frontier reached to the Firth of Forth, and here, if we trust tradition, Eadwine founded a city which bore his name, Edinburgh, Eadwine’s burgh.  To the west his arms crushed the long resistance of Elmet, the district about Leeds; he was master of Chester, and the fleet he equipped there subdued the isles of Anglesea and Man.  South of the Humber he was owned as overlord by the five English states of Mid-Britain.  The West-Saxons remained awhile independent.  But revolt and slaughter had fatally broken their power when Eadwine attacked them.  A story preserved by Baeda tells something of the fierceness of the struggle which ended in the subjection of the south to the overlordship of Northumbria.  In an Easter-court which he held in his royal city by the river Derwent, Eadwine gave audience to Eumer, an envoy of Wessex, who brought a message from its king.  In the midst of the conference Eumer started to his feet, drew a dagger from his robe, and rushed on the Northumbrian sovereign.  Lilla, one of the king’s war-band, threw himself between Eadwine and his assassin; but so furious was the stroke that even through Lilla’s body the dagger still reached its aim.  The king however recovered from his wound to march on the West-Saxons; he slew or subdued all who had conspired against him, and returned victorious to his own country.

[Sidenote:  Conversion of Northumbria]

Kent had bound itself to him by giving him its King’s daughter as a wife, a step which probably marked political subordination; and with the Kentish queen had come Paulinus, one of Augustine’s followers, whose tall stooping form, slender aquiline nose, and black hair falling round a thin worn face, were long remembered in the North.  Moved by his queen’s prayers Eadwine promised to become Christian if he returned successful from Wessex; and the wise men of Northumbria gathered to deliberate on the new faith to which he bowed.  To finer minds its charm lay then as now in the light it threw on the darkness which encompassed men’s lives, the darkness of the future as of the past.  “So seems the life of man, O king,” burst forth an aged ealdorman, “as a sparrow’s flight through the hall when one is sitting at meat in winter-tide with the warm fire lighted on the hearth but the icy rain-storm without.  The sparrow flies in at one door and tarries for a moment in the light and heat of the hearth-fire, and then flying forth from the other vanishes into the darkness whence it came.  So tarries for a moment the life of man in our sight, but what is before it, what after it, we know not.  If this new teaching