destroy. Thick mists hover above, being fed by ceaseless exhalations. They lazily turn their violet flanks, grow black, suddenly descend in heavy showers; the vapour, like a furnace-smoke, crawls for ever on the horizon. Thus watered, the plants multiply; in the angle between Jutland and the continent, in a fat muddy soil, 'the verdure is as fresh as that of England.' 1 Immense forests covered the land even after the eleventh century. The sap of this humid country, thick and potent, circulates in man as in the plants, and by its respiration, its nutrition, the sensations and habits which it generates, affects his faculties and his frame.

The land produced after this fashion has one enemy, to wit, the sea. Holland maintains its existence only by virtue of its dykes. In 1654 those in Jutland burst, and fifteen thousand of the inhabitants were swallowed up. One need see the blast of the North swirl down upon the low level of the soil, wan and ominous: 2 the vast yellow sea dashes against the narrow belt of coast which seems incapable of a moment's resistance; the wind howls and bellows; the sea-mews cry; the poor little ships flee as fast as they can, bending, almost overset, and endeavour to find a refuge in the mouth of the river, which seems as hostile as the sea. A sad and precarious existence, as it were face to face with a beast of prey. The Frisians, in their ancient laws, speak already of the league they have made against 'the ferocious ocean.' Even in a calm this sea is unsafe. 'Before the eye spreads a mighty waste of waters; above float the clouds, grey and shapeless daughters of the air, which draw up the water in their mist-buckets from the sea, carry it along laboriously, and again suffer it to fall into the sea, a sad, useless, wearisome task.' 'With flat and long extended maw, the shapeless north wind, like a scolding dotard, babbles with groaning, mysterious voice, and repeats his foolish tales.' Rain, wind, and surge leave room for naught but gloomy and melancholy thoughts. The very joy of the billows has in it an inexplicable restlessness and harshness. From Holland to Jutland, a string of small, deluged islands bears witness to their ravages; the shifting sands which the tide floats up

4

1 Malte-Brun, iv. 398. Denmark means 'low plain.' Not counting bays, gulfs, and canals, the sixteenth part of the country is covered by water. The dialect of Jutland bears still a great resemblance to the English.

2 See Ruysdaal's painting in Mr. Baring's collection. Of the three Saxon islands, North Strandt, Busen, and Heligoland, North Strandt was inundated by the sea in 1300, 1483, 1532, 1615, and almost destroyed in 1634. Busen is a level plain, beaten by storms, which it has been found necessary to surround by a dyke. Heligoland was laid waste by the sea in 800, 1300, 1500, 1649, the last time so violently that only a portion of it survived. Turner, Hist. of Angl. Saxons, 1852, i. 97.

3 Heine, die Nordsee. Cf. Tacitus, Ann. book 2, for the impressions of the Romans, truculentia cœli.'

4 Watten, Platen, Sande, Düneninseln.

obstruct with rocks the banks and entrance of the rivers.1 The first Roman fleet, a thousand vessels, perished there; to this day ships wait a month or more in sight of port, tossed upon the great white waves, not daring to risk themselves in the shifting, winding channel, notorious for its wrecks. In winter a breastplate of ice covers the two streams; the sea drives back the frozen masses as they descend; they pile themselves with a crash upon the sandbanks, and sway to and fro; now and then you may see a vessel, seized as in a vice, split in two beneath their violence. Picture, in this foggy clime, amid hoar-frost and storm, in these marshes and forests, half-naked savages, a kind of wild beasts, fishers and hunters, even hunters of men; these are they, Saxons, Angles, Jutes, Frisians; later on, Danes, who during the fifth and the ninth centuries, with their swords and battle-axes, took and kept the island of Britain.

2

A rude and foggy land, like their own, except in the depth of its sea and the safety of its coasts, which one day will call up real fleets and mighty vessels; green England-the word rises to the lips and expresses all. Here also moisture pervades everything; even in summer the mist rises; even on clear days you perceive it fresh from the great sea-girdle, or rising from vast but ever slushy moorlands, undulating with hill and dale, intersected with hedges to the limit of the horizon. Here and there a sunbeam strikes on the higher foliage with burning flash, and the splendour of the verdure dazzles and almost blinds. you. The overflowing water straightens the flabby stems; they grow up, rank, weak, and filled with sap; a sap ever renewed, for the grey mists creep over a stratum of motionless vapour, and at distant intervals the rim of heaven is drenched by heavy showers. 'There are yet commons as at the time of the Conquest, deserted, abandoned, wild, covered with furze and thorny plants, with here and there a horse grazing in the solitude. Joyless scene, poverty-stricken soil! What a labour it has been to humanise it! What impression it must have made on the men of the South, the Romans of Cæsar! I thought, when I saw it, of the ancient Saxons, wanderers from West and North, who came to settle in this land of marsh and fogs, on the border of these primeval forests, on the banks of these great muddy streams, which roll down their slime to meet the waves. They must have lived as hunters and swineherds; grow, as before, brawny, fierce, gloomy. Take civilisation from this soil, and there will remain to the inhabit

1 Nine or ten miles out, near Heligoland, are the nearest soundings of about fifty fathoms.

2 Palgrave, Saxon Commonwealth, vol. i.

3 Notes of a Journey in England.

4 Léonce de Lavergne, De l'Agriculture anglaise. The soil is much worse than that of France.'

5 There are at least four rivers in England passing by the name of 'Ouse,'' which is only another form of 'ooze.'—TR.

ants only war, the chase, gluttony, drunkenness. Smiling love, sweet poetic dreams, art, refined and nimble thought, are for the happy shores of the Mediterranean. Here the barbarian, ill housed in his mudhovel, who hears the rain rustling whole days in the oak leaves-what dreams can he have, gazing upon his mud-pools and his sombre sky?'

II.

1

Huge white bodies, cool-blooded, with fierce blue eyes, reddish flaxen hair; ravenous stomachs, filled with meat and cheese, heated by strong drinks; of a cold temperament, slow to love, home-stayers, prone to brutal drunkenness: these are to this day the features which descent and climate preserve in the race, and these are what the Roman historians discovered in their former country. There is no living, in these lands, without abundance of solid food; bad weather keeps people at home; strong drinks are necessary to cheer them; the senses become blunted, the muscles are braced, the will vigorous. In every country the body of man is rooted deep into the soil of nature; and in this instance still deeper, because, being uncultivated, he is less removed from nature. In Germany, stormbeaten, in wretched boats of hide, amid the hardships and dangers of seafaring life, they were pre-eminently adapted for endurance and enterprise, inured to misfortune, scorners of danger. Pirates at first of all kinds of hunting the man-hunt is most profitable and most noble; they left the care of the land and flocks to the women and slaves; seafaring, war, and pillage2 was their whole idea of a freeman's work. They dashed to sea in their twosailed barks, landed anywhere, killed everything; and having sacrificed in honour of their gods the tithe of their prisoners, and leaving behind them the red light of their burnings, went farther on to begin again. Lord,' says a certain litany, 'deliver us from the fury of the Jutes.' 'Of all barbarians3 these are strongest of body and heart, the most formidable,'—we may add, the most cruelly ferocious. When murder becomes a trade, it becomes a pleasure. About the eighth century, the final decay of the great Roman corpse which Charlemagne had tried to revive, and which was settling down into corruption, called them like vultures to the prey. Those who had remained in Denmark, with their brothers of Norway, fanatical pagans, incensed against the Christians, made a descent on all the surrounding coasts. Their sea-kings, who

4 (

1 Tacitus, De moribus Germanorum, passim: Diem noctemque continuare potando, nulli proborum.-Sera juvenum Venus.-Totos dies juxta focum atque ignem agunt. Dargaud, Voyage en Danemark. They take six meals per day, the first at five o'clock in the morning. One should see the faces and meals at Hamburg and at Amsterdam.'

2 Bede, v. 10. Sidonius, viii. 6. Lingard, Hist. of England, 1854, i. chap. 2. 3 Zozimos, iii. 147. Amm. Marcellinus, xxviii. 526.

4

Aug. Thierry, Hist. S. Edmundi, vi. 441. See Ynglingasaga, and especially the Saga of Egil.

had never slept under the smoky rafters of a roof, who had never drained the ale-horn by an inhabited hearth,' laughed at wind and storms, and sang: 'The blast of the tempest aids our oars; the bellow, ing of heaven, the howling of the thunder, hurt us not; the hurricane is our servant, and drives us whither we wish to go.' 'We smote with our swords,' says a song attributed to Ragnar Lodbrog; 'to me it was a joy like having my bright bride by me on the couch. He who

has never been wounded lives a weary life.' One of them, at the monastery of Peterborough, kills with his own hand all the monks, to the number of eighty-four; others, having taken King Ella, divided his ribs from the spine, and drew his lungs through the opening, so as to represent an eagle. Harold Harefoot, having seized his rival Alfred, with six hundred men, had them maimed, blinded, hamstrung, scalped, or embowelled.1 Torture and carnage, greed of danger, fury of destruction, obstinate and frenzied bravery of an over-strong temperament, the unchaining of the butcherly instincts, such traits meet us at every step in the old Sagas. The daughter of the Danish Jarl, seeing Egil taking his seat near her, repels him with scorn, reproaching him with 'seldom having provided the wolves with hot meat, with never having seen for the whole autumn a raven croaking over the carnage.' But Egil seized her and pacified her by singing: 'I have marched with my bloody sword, and the raven has followed me. Furiously we fought, the fire passed over the dwellings of men; we slept in the blood of those who kept the gates. From such table-talk, and such maid's fancies, one may judge of the rest.2

Behold them now in England, more settled and wealthier: do you look to find them much changed? Changed it may be, but for the worse, like the Franks, like all barbarians who pass from action to enjoyment. They are more gluttonous, carving their hogs, filling themselves with flesh, swallowing down deep draughts of mead, ale, spiced wines, all the strong, coarse drinks which they can procure, and so they are cheered and stimulated. Add to this the pleasure of the fight. Not easily with such instincts can they attain to culture; to find a natural and ready culture, we must look amongst the sober and sprightly populations of the south. Here the sluggish and heavy3 temperament remains long buried in a brutal life; people of the Latin race, never

1

1 Lingard, Hist. of England, i. 164, says, however, 'Every tenth man out of the six hundred received his liberty, and of the rest a few were selected for slavery.'-TR.

2 Franks, Frisians, Saxons, Danes, Norwegians, Icelanders, are one and the same people. Their language, laws, religion, poetry, differ but little. The more northern continue longest in their primitive manners. Germany in the fourth and fifth centuries, Denmark and Norway in the seventh and eighth, Iceland in the tenth and eleventh centuries, present the same condition, and the documents of each country will fill up the gaps that exist in the history of the others.

3 Tacitus, De mor. Germ. xxii.: Gens nec astuta nec callida.

at a first glance see in them aught but large gross beasts, clumsy and ridiculous when not dangerous and enraged. Up to the sixteenth century, says an old historian, the great body of the nation were little else than herdsmen, keepers of beasts for flesh and fleece; up to the end of the eighteenth drunkenness was the recreation of the higher ranks; it is still that of the lower; and all the refinement and softening influence of civilisation have not abolished amongst them the use of the rod and the fist. If the carnivorous, warlike, drinking savage, proof against the climate, still shows beneath the conventions of our modern society and the softness of our modern polish, imagine what he must have been when, landing with his band upon a wasted or desert country, and becoming for the first time a settler, he saw on the horizon the common pastures of the border country, and the great primitive forests which furnished stags for the chase and acorns for his pigs. The ancient histories tell us that they had a great and a coarse appetite.1 Even at the time of the Conquest the custom of drinking to excess was a common vice with men of the highest rank, and they passed in this way whole days and nights without intermission. Henry of Huntingdon, in the twelfth century, lamenting the ancient hospitality, says that the Norman kings provided their courtiers with only one meal a day, while the Saxon kings used to provide four. One day, when Athelstan went with his nobles to visit his relative Ethelfleda, the provision of mead was exhausted at the first salutation, owing to the copiousness of the draughts; but Saint Dunstan, forecasting the extent of the royal appetite, had furnished the house, so that though the cup-bearers, as is the custom at royal feasts, were able the whole day to serve it out in horns and other vessels, the liquor was not found to be deficient. When the guests were satisfied, the harp passed from hand to hand, and the rude harmony of their deep voices swelled under the vaulted roof. The monasteries themselves in Edgard's time kept up games, songs, and dances till midnight. To shout, to drink, to caper about, to feel their veins heated and swollen with wine, to hear and see around them the riot of the orgy, this was the first need of the Barbarians.2 The heavy human brute gluts himself with sensations and with noise.

For this appetite there was a stronger grazing-ground,—I mean, blows and battle. In vain they attached themselves to the soil, became cultivators, in distinct communities and distinct regions, shut up in their march with their kindred and comrades, bound together, sepa

3

1 Craik and MacFarlane, Pictorial History of England, 1837, i. 337. W. of Malmesbury. Henry of Huntingdon, vi. 365.

2 Tacitus, De moribus Germanorum, xxii., xxiii.

3 Kemble, Saxons in England, 1849, i. 70, ii. 184. "The Acts of an Anglo-Saxon parliament are a series of treaties of peace between all the associations which make up the state; a continual revision and renewal of the alliances offensive and defensive of all the free men. They are universally mutual contracts for the maintenance of the frid or peace.'