THE SAXONS IN ENGLAND.
[book ɪ.
and Slavonic migrations were poured, and here,
through hundreds of years, were probablyreproduced
convulsions, terminated only by the great outbreak
which the Germans call the wandering of the nations.
For successive generations, the tribes, or even por-
tions of tribes, may have moved from place to
place, as the necessities of their circumstances de-
manded ; names may have appeared, and vanished
altogether from the scene; wars, seditions, con-
quests, the rise and fall of states, the solemn forma-
tion or dissolution of confederacies, may have filled
the ages which intervened between the first settle-
ment of the Teutons in Germany, and their appear-
ance in history as dangerous to the quiet of Йоте.
The heroic lays 1 may possibly preserve some sha-
dowy traces of these events ; but of all the changes
in detail we know nothing: we argue only that
nations possessing in so preeminent a degree as
the Germans, the principles, the arts and institu-
tions of civilization, must have passed through a
long apprenticeship of action and suffering, and
have learnt in the rough school of practice the
wisdom they embodied in their lives.
Possessing no written annals, and trusting to the
ɪ The Anglosaxon Traveller’s Song contains a multitude of names
which cannot be found elsewhere. Paulus Diaconus and Jornandes
have evidently used ancient poems as the foundation of their histories.
The lays of the various Germanic cycles still furnish details respecting
Hermanaric, Otachar, Theodoric, Hiltihrant and other heroes of this
troubled period. But the reader who Wouldjudge of the fragmentary
and unsatisfactory result of all that the ancient world has recorded of
the new, had better consult that most remarkable work of Zeuss, Die
Deutschen und die Nachbarstamme. Munich, 1837. He will there see
how the profoundest science halts after the reality of ancient ages, and
strives in vuιn to reduce their manifold falsehood to a truth.
сн. I.]
SAXON AND WELSH TRADITIONS.
poet the task of the historian, our forefathers have
left but scanty records of their early condition ɪ.
Nor did the supercilious or unsuspecting ignorance
of Italy care to enquire into the mode of life and
habits of the barbarians until their strong arms
threatened the civilization and the very existence
of the empire itself. Then first, dimly through the
twilight in which the sun of Rome was to set for
ever, loomed the Colossus of the German race,
gigantic, terrible, inexplicable ; and the vague at-
tempt to define its awful features came too late to
be fully successful. In Tacitus, the city possessed
indeed a thinker worthy of the exalted theme ; but
his sketch, though vigorous beyond expectation, is
incomplete in many of the most material points:
yet this is the most detailed and fullest account
which we possess, and nearly the only certain
source of information till we arrive at the moment
when the invading tribes in every portion of the
empire entered upon their great task of recon-
structing society from its foundations. Slowly,
from point to point, and from time to time, traces
are recognized of powerful struggles, of national
movements, of destructive revolutions: but the
definite facts which emerge from the darkness of
the first three centuries are rare and fragmentary.
Let us confine our attention to that portion of
the race which settled on our own shores.
The testimony of contemporaneous history as-
sures us that about the middle of the fifth century,
1 “ Célébrant carminibus antiquis, quod unum apud illos memoriae
et annalium genus est.” Tac. Mor. Germ. cap. ii.