still glittering with bronze; the mausoleum of Adrian, not yet deprived of its columns and statues; the Flavian amphitheater, not yet degraded into a quarry, told to the Mercian and Northumbrian pilgrims some part of the story of that great civilized world which had passed away. The islanders returned, with awe deeply impressed on their half-opened minds, and told the wondering inhabitants of the hovels of London and York that, near the grave of Saint Peter, a mighty race, now extinct, had piled up buildings which would never be dissolved till the judgment day. Learning followed in the train of Christianity. The poetry and eloquence of the Augustan age were assiduously studied in the Anglo-Saxon monasteries. The names of Bede, of Alcuin, and of John, surnamed Erigena, were justly celebrated throughout Europe. Such was the state of our country when, in the ninth century, began the last great descent of the northern barbarians.

During several generations Denmark and Scandinavia continued to pour forth innumerable pirates, distinguished by strength, by valor, by merciless ferocity, and by hatred of the Christian name. No country suffered so much from these invaders as England. Her coast lay near to the ports whence they sailed; nor was any part of our island so far distant from the sea as to be secure from attack. The same atrocities which had attended the victory of the Saxon over the Celt were now, after the lapse of ages, suffered by the Saxon at the hand of the Dane. Civilization, just as it began to rise, was met by this blow, and sank down once more. Large colonies of adventurers from the Baltic established themselves on the eastern shores, spread gradually westward, and, supported by constant re-enforcements from beyond the sea, aspired to the dominion of the whole realm. The struggle between the two fierce Teutonic breeds lasted during six generations. Each was alternately paramount. Cruel massacres followed by cruel retribution, provinces wasted, convents plundered, and cities razed to the ground, make up the greater part of the history of those evil days. At

length the North ceased to send forth a constant stream of fresh depredators, and from that time the mutual aversion of the races began to subside. Intermarriage became frequent. The Danes learned the religion of the Saxons, and thus one cause of deadly animosity was removed. The Danish and Saxon tongues, both dialects of one widespread language, were blended together. But the distinction between the two nations was by no means effaced, when an event took place which prostrated both, in common slavery and degradation, at the feet of a third people.

The Normans were then the foremost race of Christendom. Their valor and ferocity had made them conspicuous among the rovers whom Scandinavia had sent forth to ravage Western Europe. Their sails were long the terror of both coasts of the Channel. Their arms were repeatedly carried far into the heart of the Carlovingian empire, and were victorious under the walls of Maestricht and Paris. At length one of the feeble heirs of Charlemagne ceded to the strangers a fertile province, watered by a noble river, and contiguous to the sea, which was their favorite element. In that province they founded a mighty state, which gradually extended its influence over the neighboring principalities of Brittany and Maine. Without laying aside that dauntless valor which had been the terror of every land from the Elbe to the Pyrenees, the Normans rapidly acquired all, and more than all, the knowledge and refinement which they found in the country where they settled. Their courage secured their territory against foreign invasion. They established internal order, such as had long been unknown in the Frank empire. They embraced Christianity, and with Christianity they learned a great part of what the clergy had to teach. They abandoned their native speech, and adopted the French tongue, in which the Latin was the predominant element. They speedily raised their new language to a dignity and importance which it had never before possessed. They found it a barbarous jargon;

er.

they fixed it in writing; and they employed it in legislation, in poetry, and in romance. They renounced that brutal intemperance to which all the other branches of the great German family were too much inclined. The polite luxury of the Norman presented a striking contrast to the coarse voracity and drunkenness of his Saxon and Danish neighbors. He loved to display his magnificence, not in huge piles of food and hogsheads of strong drink, but in large and stately edifices, rich armor, gallant horses, choice falcons, well-ordered tournaments, banquets delicate rather than abundant, and wines remarkable rather for their exquisite flavor than for their intoxicating powThat chivalrous spirit which has exercised so powerful an influence on the politics, morals, and manners of all the European nations, was found in the highest exaltation among the Norman nobles. Those nobles were distinguished by their graceful bearing and insinuating address. They were distinguished also by their skill in negotiation, and by a natural eloquence which they assiduously cultivated. It was the boast of one of their historians that the Norman gentlemen were orators from the cradle. But their chief fame was derived from their military exploits. Every country, from the Atlantic Ocean. to the Dead Sea, witnessed the prodigies of their discipline and valor. One Norman knight, at the head of a handful of warriors, scattered the Celts of Connaught. Another founded the monarchy of the Two Sicilies, and saw the emperors both of the East and of the West fly before his arms. A third, the Ulysses of the first crusade, was invested by his fellow-soldiers with the sovereignty of Antioch; and a fourth, the Tancred whose name lives in he great poem of Tasso, was celebrated through Ch stendom as the bravest and most generous of the champions of the Holy Sepulchre.

The vicinity of so remarkable a people early began to produce an effect on the public mind of England. Before the Conquest, English princes received their education in Normandy. English sees and English estates were be

stowed on Normans. Norman-French was familiarly spokThe court of Rouen seems to have been to the court of Edward the Confessor what the court of Versailles long afterward was to the court of Charles the Second.

en in the palace of Westminster.

The battle of Hastings, and the events which followed it, not only placed a Duke of Normandy on the English throne, but gave up the whole population of England to the tyranny of the Norman race. The subjugation of a nation by a nation has seldom, even in Asia, been more complete. The country was portioned out among the captains of the invaders. Strong military institutions, closely connected with the institution of property, enabled the foreign conquerors to oppress the children of the soil. A cruel penal code, cruelly enforced, guarded the privileges, and even the sports, of the alien tyrants. Yet the subject race, though beaten down and trodden under foot, still made its sting felt. Some bold men, the favorite heroes of our oldest ballads, betook themselves to the woods, and there, in defiance of curfew laws and forest laws, waged a predatory war against their oppressors. Assassination was an event of daily occurrence. Many Normans suddenly disappeared, leaving no trace. corpses of many were found bearing the marks of violence. Death by torture was denounced against the murderers, and strict search was made for them, but generally in vain, for the whole nation was in a conspiracy to screen them. It was at length thought necessary to lay a heavy fine on every hundred in which a person of French extraction should be found slain; and this regulation was followed up by another regulation, providing that every person who was found slain should be sup posed to be a Frenchman, unless he was proved to be a Saxon.

The

During the century and a half which followed the Conquest, there is, to speak strictly, no English history. The French kings of England rose, indeed, to an eminence which was the wonder and dread of all neighboring

nations.

They conquered Ireland. They received the homage of Scotland. By their valor, by their policy, by their fortunate matrimonial alliances, they became far more powerful on the Continent than their liege lords, the kings of France. Asia, as well as Europe, was dazzled by their power and glory. Arabian chroniclers recorded with unwilling admiration the fall of Acre, the defense of Joppa, and the victorious march to Ascalon; and Arabian mothers long awed their infants to silence with the name of the lion-hearted Plantagenet. At one time it seemed that the line of Hugh Capet was about to end as the Merovingian and Carlovingian lines had ended, and that a single great monarchy would spread from the Orkneys to the Pyrences. So strong an association is established in most minds between the greatness of a sovereign and the greatness of the nation which he rules, that almost every historian of England has expatiated with a sentiment of exultation on the power and splendor of her foreign masters, and has lamented the decay of that power and splendor as a calamity to our country. This is, in truth, as absurd as it would be in a Haytian negro of our time to dwell with national pride on the greatness of Louis the Fourteenth, and to speak of Blenheim and Ramillies with patriotic regret and shame. The Conqueror and his descendants to the fourth generation were not Englishmen; most of them were born in France; they spent the greater part of their lives in France; their ordinary speech was French; almost every high office in their gift was filled by a Frenchman ; every acquisition which they made on the Continent estranged them more and more from the population of our island. One of the ablest among them, indeed, attempted to win the hearts of his English subjects by espousing an English princess; but, by many of his barons, this marriage was regarded as a marriage between a white planter and a Quadroon girl would now be regarded in Virginia. In history he is known by the honorable surname of Beauclerc; but, in his own time, his own countrymen