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 alto

Nothing can equal the feanything so disgusting as

gether on horseback or in wagons. rocity of the Fennians, nor is there 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 begin nings 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

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 me rolleth a waste of water

and above me go rolling the storm clouds, the formless dark-gray daughters of air, which from the sea, in cloudy buckets scoop up the water, ever wearied lifting and lifting, and then pour it again in the sea, a mournful wearisome business. Over the sea, flat on his face, lies the monstrous, terrible North Wind, sighing and sinking his voice as in secret, like an old grumbler; for once in good humor, unto the ocean he talks, and he tells her wonderful stories." 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 drifts up obstruct and impede the banks and entrance of the rivers. The first Roman fleet, a thousand sail, 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, but especially 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.

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 meadows, undulating with hill and dale, intersected with hedges to the limit of the horizon. Here and there a sunbeam strikes on the higher grasses with burning flash and the splendor of the verdure dazzles and almost blinds