knob at the pommel. Their ponderous battle axes, famous in every land, from the east, where they were wielded by the Varangian body-guard of the Greek emperors, to their colonies among the Celts in Ireland, are well known; while their personal ornaments are supposed to have a character which connects them with eastern art. The vulgar in some parts of England are disposed to ascribe all such relies to the "bloody Danes," but antiquaries are unable always to distinguish them from British, Anglo-Saxon or Roman remains. The same may be said of their fortified camps. Invading the coast in numerous independent detachments inferior in numbers to the people they attacked, the Northmen skilfully threw up intrenchments on insulated heights and promontories of commanding position, or availed themselves of antient British and Roman fortifications for their protection. Some of the Danish encampments are found in the interior of the northern districts, as at Sharnbank near Harrowgate, and Gateshill camp, of large area, about 200 feet above the level of the Nid, a river-name still found in Norway as well as in the south of Scotland settled by the Northmen. But it is in the neighbourhood of the coasts that the fortified camps of the piratical Vikings can be most clearly traced. From Flamborough head boldly projecting into the German ocean and separated from the main land by an immense rampart, still called "the Dane's dyke,” to the mouths of the Humber and the Thames, along the southern coast of England and on the hills which border the eastern shore of the Bristol channel,-wherever an eastuary or a river gave access to their long gallies, or there was a sheltered strand on which they could be beached the mouldering bank and the grassy trench still remain to connect the Chronicles of the times with the scenes of the desolation they record.

The barrows raised over the remains of the invaders can seldom be distinguished from similar remains of an earlier age, except when they are found in the neighbourhood where some great battle was fought between the Danes and Anglo-Saxons. Several such tumuli are seen near North Deighton in Yorkshire; one of them of very large dimensions. The Northmen becoming christianized, soon after their settlement in England, their rites of sepulture then accorded with their new faith, and their memorials have perished with the churches of those early times. The tombs

of Canute the Great, and his son Hardicanute, still preserved among the monuments of the Anglo-Saxon kings in Winchester cathedral, proudly tell of the former dominance of the Danish race; but we have seldom mused with greater interest on a memorial of the dead, than when decyphering the inscription on a rude stone in the antient church-yard of St John-in-castro at Lewes in Sussex, which tells that a Danish chief of royal rank rests beneath. It is carved, not inelegantly, with a double cross, the lower transom, fleuri, the upper having four quatrefoils in a circle round the angles of intersection; and it records in Latin verse that it covered the remains of a warrior of the royal race of the Danes whose name Magnus was the mark of his great descent, but who exchanged his greatness and his life of action for the peaceful guise of a poor anchorite. Who he was, neither history or legend further tell,-mystery shrouds the fate of the royal Dane.

The conclusion which may be fairly drawn from a careful investigation of Anglo-Danish or Norwegian memorials is that the results of the invasion and occupation of England by the Northmen during the Anglo-Saxon period were, as we are inclined to think, neither so barren nor so transient as is commonly supposed. Rejecting pretensions which have been advanced to an extent far beyond what there is any historical evidence to support, we fully admit the value of the foreign element which in the ninth and tenth centuries entered into the national character and institutions of the English people. It is impossible to suppose that an immigration which extended itself over such wide districts of the country, and added so largely to the native population, as we have seen it did, and that an ascendancy which prevailed, more or less, for two centuries in those kingdoms of the former Heptarchy and at length absorbed the whole, should have been without important consequences. It has been seen that they did not end with the restoration of the Saxon line, nor even with the Norman conquest.

We may not be able, after so great a lapse of time, to trace the various phases in which this extraneous influence was precisely developed but we appear to have sufficient ground for specially attributing the predilection of the English for seafaring pursuits, their spirit of enterprise, their wide colonization and naval pre

eminence to their early union with the most maritime people of that age. Nor can we hesitate in great measure to ascribe the love of national and personal independence, which has animated the English nation during its long struggles for popular liberty, to germs implanted by the grafting on the old stock of a rude but vigorous branch, of the same family, and from a soil on which a singular equality in the rights of property was disseminated among the whole body of the people, and where institutions flourished which admitted them to a large share in the management of public affairs, and in the enactment and administration of laws. The same feeling of resolute independence, the same ardour for self government and impatience of despotic influence still characterise the homely bonders of Norway, in whom we may even now recognise the sturdy likeness of our fathers.

It is therefore in the general impression which the free genius of the Northmen made on the national character of the people among whom they came as conquerors and colonists, that we trace the enduring benefits which flowed from an invasion attended by many barbarities and at first sight fraught only with disaster. The principles of freedom were doubtless inherent in all the races of Teutonic origin, but they maintain a more tenacious hold on the northern branch which was early separated from the parent stock. At this day, the German nations make aspirations only to constitutional government, while the descendants of the Anglo-Danes with their posterity in America—and, what is still more remarkable, the purest remnant of the Scandinavian race in Norwayenjoy the privilege of self government to the fullest practical effect. The Anglo-Saxons had inherited more, perhaps, of the spirit of freedom than any other branch of the Teutonic race, except the most northern, but at the time of the invasion of the Danes they had much degenerated. Their Gemots had become less popular than the Scandinavian Things, and the great mass of the people were in a state of servitude; while religion, as it was then taught, led them to depend more on supernatural intervention than upon their own exertions, prudence and valour. If they had been prepared to fight, as a nation of freemen ought and would have done, for their homes, their liberty, and their national existence, the Anglo-Saxons would have repelled the first piratical bands of the northern invaders from their shores, or not a man

would have returned to invite fresh aggressions by tidings of the wealth and weakness of the islanders.

Without admitting the entire truthfulness of the representations which have been made of the priest-ridden, slavish, and effeminate condition into which the Anglo-Saxon people had fallen when the "bloody Danes" came among them,-for there were still noble spirits in the country from the time of Alfred the Great to that of the Etheling Ironsides, and a noble stand the people made, when once roused, against the formidable force of the Northmen, so that though continually recruited, it never, or but for a short interval, was able to effect the complete subjugation of Anglo-Saxon England,—and not discovering that any positively new elements were introduced into the national institutions, we yet feel that, amid the general decay, the time was come when it required the infusion of new and vigorous blood to put fresh life into the individual, social, and political, existence of the Anglo-Saxon people. But it was renovation, a fresh stimulus, the contagion of independent organization, that were alone wanting. Had the AnglcSaxons not partaken of the spirit inherent in all the members of the great Teutonic family, they would have been completely conquered; had their customs and institutions not been intrinsically the same as those of the tribe which was for a while predominant, they might have yielded and been changed in the presence of a polity framed in bolder lines. As it happened, in the wise dispensations of Providence, reciprocal benefits were conferred. The fierce spirit of the Northmen became tempered and humanized by their being brought into contact with a higher civilization and a purer faith, and the northern genius lent itself freely to the arts of peace; while the love of freedom of the Anglo-Saxon race was reanimated by fresh draughts from the stream which flowed direct from the fountain head, popular liberty found support in an independent class of settlers spread over the land, the industry of the native inhabitants received a new impulse from the maritime and commercial enterprise of the foreign colonists of their towns and sea-ports, and their courage was stimulated and tried by a long series of desperate conflicts with tribes whose swords were for many centuries the scourge of Europe.

The contest for supremacy between the two races, and more especially the exhaustion of Harold's force by the sanguinary

battle of Stanford bridge, prepared the way for the Norman conquest of England; while the Anglo-Danes of the northern districts were the last to submit to the Conqueror's yoke. We admit that their spirit, infused into the heart of the Anglo-Saxon people, greatly contributed to the long continued struggle for their antient liberties which animated them to resist the tyranny of our early kings, and had a most important influence in working out the English laws, institutions and character, as they at present exist. But we find no grounds for the assertion that "the Danes annihilated entirely and for ever the Anglo-Saxon power, and that as a people the latter sank entirely, and left only a part of their civilization and institutions to their successors in dominion, the Danes and Norwegians." On the contrary, every one knows that it was the laws of Edward the Confessor, originating in times before the Danish invasion, which William the Norman was prevailed on to confirm, and not the Anglo-Danish laws, for which we are told he had a strong and natural predilection. It was these laws of their old Anglo-Saxon kings which were passionately desired by the English people during the first centuries after the conquest, and the confirmation of which they wrung, as opportunity offered, from the reluctant hands of their Norman tyrants; and these were the foundation of the great charter of English liberties. What were the peculiarities of the Danish laws current in the districts they occupied we do not at all know. History, while it tells us that one third of England was for several centuries subject to these Danish laws, throws no light whatever on the particulars in which they differed from the Anglo-Saxon laws, nor on the nature of the institutions that were connected with them. They have passed away with the decline of the Danish power and left no record of their provisions, whatever may have been the indirect influence which we are willing to believe they probably had on the national character and institutions.

Whatever may have been the specific difference to which reference has just been made, the general correspondence in their laws and institutions, their common origin, and the affinity of their several dialects of the same mother tongue, formed connecting links between the two races which from the time of Alfred jointly occupied the soil of England. After the first