ners, as often happens in the navigation of rivers, take different stations. and shift from one place to another, as the exigence may require. Riches are by this people held in great esteem; and the public mind, debased by that passion, yields to the government of one, with unconditional, with passive obedience. Despotism is here fully established. The people are not allowed to carry arms in common, like the rest of the German nations. An officer is appointed to keep in a magazine all the military weapons, and for this purpose a slave is always chosen. For this policy the ostensible reason is, that the ocean is their natural fence against foreign invasions, and in time of peace the giddy multitude, with arms ready at hand, soon proceeds from luxury to tumult and commotion. But the truth is, the jealousy of a despotic prince does not think it safe to commit the care of his arsenal to the nobles or the men of ingenuous birth. Even a manumitted slave is not fit to be trusted.

At the further extremity beyond the Suiones there is another sea, whose sluggish waters seem to be in a state of stagnation. By this lazy element the globe is said to be encircled, and the supposition receives some color of probability from an extraordinary phenomenon well known in those regions. The rays of the setting sun continue till the return of day to brighten the hemisphere with so clear a light that the stars are imperceptible. To this it is added by vulgar credulity that when the sun begins to rise, the sound of the emerging luminary is distinctly heard, and the very form of the horses, with the blaze of glory around the head of the god, is palpable to the sight. The boundaries of nature, it is generally believed, terminate here.

On the coast to the right of the Suevian Ocean the Astyans have fixed their habitations. In their dress and manners they resemble the Suevians, but their language has more affinity to the dialect of Britain. They worship the mother of the gods. The figure of a wild boar is the symbol of their superstition; and he who has that emblem about him thinks himself secure even in the thickest ranks of the enemy, without any need of arms, or any other mode of defense. The use of iron is unknown, and their general weapon is a club. In the cultivation of corn, and other fruits of the earth, they labor with more patience than is consistent with the natural laziness of the Germans. Their industry is exerted in another instance: they explore the sea for amber in their language called Glese, and are the only people

who gather that curious substance. It is generally found among the shallows; sometimes on the shore. Concerning the nature or the causes of this concretion, the barbarians, with their usual want of curiosity, make no inquiry. Amongst other superfluities discharged by the sea, this substance lay long neglected, till Roman luxury gave it a name, and brought it into request. To the savages it is of no use. They gather it in rude heaps, and offer it for sale without any form or polish, wondering at the price they receive for it. There is reason to think that amber is a distillation from certain trees, since in the transparent medium we see a variety of insects, and even animals of the wing, which, being caught in the viscous fluid, are afterwards, when it grows hard, incorporated with it. It is probable, therefore, that as the East has its luxuriant plantations, where balm and frankincense perspire through the pores of trees, so the continents and islands of the West have their prolific groves, whose juices, fermented by the heat of the sun, dissolve into a liquid matter, which falls into the sea, and, being there condensed, is afterwards discharged by the winds and waves on the opposite shore. If you make an experiment of amber by the application of fire, it kindles like a torch, emitting a fragrant flame, and, in a little time, taking the tenacious nature of pitch or rosin. Beyond the Suiones we next find the nation of Sitones, differing in nothing from the former except the tameness with which they suffer a woman to reign over them. Of this people it is not enough to say that they have degenerated from civil liberty: they are sunk below slavery itself. At this place ends the territory of the Suevians.

Whether the Peucinians, the Venedians, and Fennians are to be accounted Germans, or classed with the people of Sarmatia, is a point not easy to be determined: though the Peucinians, called by some the Bastarnians, bear a strong resemblance to the Germans. They use the same language: their dress and habitations are the same, and they are equally inured to sloth and filth. Of late, however, in consequence of frequent intermarriages between their leading chieftains and the families of Sarmatia, they have been tainted with the manners of that country. The Venedians are a counterpart of the Sarmatians; like them they lead a wandering life, and support themselves by plunder amidst the woods and mountains that separate the Peucinians and the Fennians. They are, notwithstanding, to be ascribed to Germany, inasmuch as they have settled habitations,

know the use of shields, and travel always on foot, remarkable for their swiftness. The Sarmatians, on the contrary, live altogether on horseback or in wagons. Nothing can equal the ferocity of the Fennians, nor is there anything so disgusting as their filth and poverty. Without arms, without horses, and without a fixed place of abode, they lead a vagrant life; their food the common herbage; the skins of beasts their only clothing; and the bare earth their resting place. For their chief support they depend on their arrows, to which for want of iron, they prefix a pointed bone. The women follow the chase in company with the men, and claim their share of the prey. To protect their infants from the fury of wild beasts, and the inclemency of the weather, they make a kind of cradle amidst the branches of trees interwoven together, and they know no other expedient. The youth of the country have the same habitation, and amidst the trees old age is rocked to rest. Savage as this way of life may seem, they prefer it to the drudgery of the field, the labor of building, and the painful vicissitudes of hope and fear, which always attend the defense and the acquisition of property. Secure against the passions of men, and fearing nothing from the anger of the gods, they have attained that uncommon state of felicity, in which there is no craving left to form a single wish.

The rest of what I have been able to collect is too much involved in fable, of a color with the accounts of the Hellusians and the Oxionians, of whom we are told that they have the human face, with the limbs and bodies of wild beasts. But reports of this kind, unsupported by proof, I shall leave to the pen of others.

Complete. Murphy's translation.

HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE

(1828-1893)

HE opening essay of Taine's "History of English Literature » is one of the most important of the nineteenth century and perhaps more characteristic than any other of what has been peculiarly the nineteenth-century method in the study of literature and of history. In order to reach a base for his "History of English Literature," he was not content to study England as he saw it in his lifetime. He went backward over the course of the development of the English character until he found its germ in the Saxons and Angles, men with "huge white bodies, cool blooded, with fierce blue eyes," to account for whom he left England to study on the coasts of the North Sea, the morasses and fogs in which two thousand years ago the barbarians whom Rome could not subdue, led a sad and precarious existence, as it were, face to face with beasts of prey." Literature now has been carried far back towards its origin in human nature itself. Human nature is to be studied as it is affected by soil and climate, by environment in all its manifestations, and by the pressure of men upon each other. Art thus studied is traced back to the time of the cave man, and is accounted for in everything but the details of its development when the first rude picture is found scratched upon the ivory of a mammoth tusk. Literature, by the same rule, is followed to its beginnings in the "runes on the staves of the bards or on the sword blades of the warriors of a period almost as remote as the time when the peoples of Europe were still septs of a single tribe, speaking a common language and having a common origin. The action of man upon nature, the reflex action of nature upon man, are considered as the springs of history, in all its phases. This idea, as its controls the literary methods of Taine, is chiefly what made him so remarkable among the great critics of his century, but he is also a master of prose style, as eminent among French writers as Macaulay is among English. He was born at Vouziers, France, April 21st, 1828. His education was careful and thorough, including, as it did, courses in medicine and general science after he had taken the highest honors of the Collège Bourbon in Paris. In 1864 he became professor of Esthetics at the École des Beaux Arts, and in 1864 and 1865 published the work by which he is best known to readers of Eng

lish, the always memorable "History of English Literature," - with which, whether it be considered as a series of essays or as a critical history of the development of English literature, there is nothing else to compare. It is, however, only one of many works of great brilliancy published by Taine between 1853, when he took his doctor's degree on his "Essay on the Fables of La Fontaine," and 1891, when his "Le Régime Moderne" appeared. He died at Paris, March 5th, 1893.

THE SAXONS AS THE SOURCE OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

A

I. ENVIRONMENT AND CHARACTER

S YOU coast the North Sea from the Scheldt to Jutland, you will mark, in the first place, that the characteristic feature is the want of slope; marsh, waste, shoal; the rivers hardly drag themselves along, swollen and sluggish, with long, blacklooking waves; the flooding stream oozes over the banks, and appears further on in stagnant pools. In Holland the soil is but a sediment of mud; here and there only does the earth cover it with a crust, shallow and brittle, the mere alluvium of the river, which the river seems ever about to destroy. Thick clouds hover above, being fed by ceaseless exhalations. They lazily turn their violet flanks, grow black, suddenly descend in heavy showers; the vapor like a furnace smoke, crawls forever on the horizon. Thus watered, plants multiply; in the angle between Jutland and the continent, in a fat, muddy soil, "the verdure is as fresh as that of England." 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; man's respiration, nutrition, sensations, and habits affect also 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 dikes. In 1654 those in Jutland burst, and fifteen thousand of the inhabitants were swallowed up. One need only see the blast of the North swirl down upon the low level of the soil, wan and ominous: the vast yellow sea dashes against the narrow belt of flat 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 to the gunwale, and endeavor to find a refuge in the mouth of the river, which seems as hostile as the sea. A sad and precarious existence, as it