which still remains. But the very site inspires reverence when we remember that here was fought the last battle which Englishmen ever waged with an invading foe, and that here perished in a dreadful combat the last of an ancient line of sovereigns. But this kind of historic interest ends not here. We are presented with a hero-king "slain in war," but we are presented also with a victor destined to be the first of a long race of princes, who from this event take the beginning of the sway they have so long held in England. It is related that the duke, as he reposed after the battle, dreamed that he heard a voice which said to him—"Thou hast conquered; seize upon the crown and transmit it to a long posterity." It is now nearly eight hundred years since the voice was heard or seemed to be heard, and there is every prospect that the power then acquired by the Norman, modified as time goes on and men grow wiser, will descend in the same line for centuries yet to come.
These are among the earliest of the thoughts which spring up in the mind when in a meditative mood the holy precincts of this monastery are paced. We think also of the sacred rites which through five centuries were celebrated here: of the convent-bell; of the lighted windows; of the holy anthem; of the alms; of the sacred commemorations of the dead. Would that our reformers had felt more of the spirit of what we may call the poetry of religion. But the monastery of Battle while it shared all these with Glastonbury, St. Albans, and other early foundations of its class, has one circumstance peculiar to itself. It was not only a house of religion, it was a national monument, intended so to be, and if I say that you, people of Sussex, had in this the grandest monument of any public event which the piety, the affection, or the political wisdom of any of our princes has led them to erect, I say no more than what all England must allow to you. It was The Abbey of the Battle, the commemorative structure of that great event; and Battle we see has superseded every name by which the place might in earlier times be designated.
There are traces of that political sagacity which his contemporaries ascribe to William in the erection of so splendid a trophy. It was to some extent a support of the new power he had acquired. It awed the poor Saxon. It maintained
