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BOOK IV.
THE HEATHEN ALTAR AND THE SAXON CHURCH.
CHAPTER I.
While Harold sleeps, let us here pause to survey for the first time
the greatness of that House to which Sweyn's exile had left him the
heir. The fortunes of Godwin had been those which no man not
eminently versed in the science of his kind can achieve. Though the
fable which some modern historians of great name have repeated and
detailed, as to his early condition as the son of a cow-herd, is
utterly groundless [99], and he belonged to a house all-powerful at
the time of his youth, he was unquestionably the builder of his own
greatness. That he should rise so high in the early part of his