From the intimate relation between the prince and the gesið or comites there arose certain reciprocal rights and duties :—these sanctioned by custom or adopted from convenience, gradually formed themselves into a code of laws, which ultimately affected the condition and even the social existence of the freemen. In the earlier development of the comitatus, the idea of freedom is supplanted by the more questionable motive of honour, or, to speak more strictly, of rank and station. The comes may become, by gift from his employer, possessed of land, even of very large tracts. But he could not be the possessor of a free hyde, nor consequently bound to service in the general fyrd, or to suit in the folcmot. Wealth, honour, and rank were his abundantly, but not freedom. However, in exchange for freedom he escaped from the toilsome duties of the farm, and the irksome routine of the popular court and judicature, to the plenty of the castle, to its stirring adventure, and occasional repose. The markmen might raze him from their roll, and give his land to a worthier holder; but the very erazure would recommend him to a lord who regarded the mark with no favourable eye, and the loss of his portion in the free land would secure his dependence, and perhaps be compensated to him fifty fold. The tokens of his servitude were numerous and palpable. The comes, however endowed or advanced, was a menial; housed within the walls, fed at the table and clothed at the expense of his chief. His life was not his own; it had been bought with a price. He could not contract marriage, nor bequeath his property, nor exchange his master, without special permission. He might not, like the freeman, atone for his offences by a pecuniary mulct; but was liable to degradation, expulsion, and even death itself. These, however, were the casualties of his position, which he might easily avoid, and which the interest, if not the humanity, of his chief would rarely enforce. In return for his sacrifice of freedom, and his liability to disgrace, the comes obtained a maintenance, a life of adventure, and with it the chance of preferment and his prince's favour. He had his portion of the spoil; he was admitted to the festival: for him and his fellows, as partaking the joys and sorrows of their chief, were the triumph and the banquet, the pleasures of the chace and the minstrel's song, the remembrance of danger shared and of fealty gallantly redeemed. As the royal power advanced, the place of the comes advanced also; and while the old noble by birth, as well as the ceorl, sank into a lower rank, the noble by service won for himself lands and horses, arms and jewels, and titular distinctions, ecclesiastical and civil. Finally, the nobles by birth themselves became absorbed in the ever

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widening whirlpool. Day by day the freemen, deprived of ⚫ their old national defences, and wringing with difficulty a pre'carious subsistence from incessant labour, sullenly yielded to a yoke which they could not shake off; and commended them'selves (such was the phrase) to the protection of a lord; till a complete change having thus been operated in the opinions ' of men, and consequently in every relation of society, a new ' order of things was consummated, in which the honours and 'security of service became more anxiously desired than a needy and unsafe freedom; and the alods being finally surrendered, 'to be taken back as beneficia, under mediate lords, the founda'tions of the royal, feudal system were securely laid on every 'side.'

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The concluding chapter of the first volume is occupied with a general survey of Anglo-Saxon heathendom. The historian an outworn creed' should be neither a missionary nor a polemic in his feelings. He may admit the creed and the legends of his forefathers to be dark, inconsistent and unsatisfying, when compared with revealed truths and with the more critical and humane spirit of a later era. But he misunder

stands his office if he treats them with intolerance or disrespect. He is not an iconoclast, but an artist who, while restoring some dilapidated shrine, can never forget that it was once hallowed and is still beautiful. It is an opposite but equally grave error, to view the symbols and doctrines of an extinct faith through the medium of Pantheism. Earnest they once were, and held by earnest men; or they had never been rooted in the heart of generations, to whom nature was a living presence, and notional abstractions nearly unknown. Mr. Kemble has avoided both these mistakes, in his synoptical view of the Anglo-Saxon Pantheon. Although obliged by his limits both to condense and omit, he has illustrated the subject from many sources hitherto unexplored or unemployed; and has treated it throughout with an imaginative and philosophical vigour, which renders this chapter perhaps the most original and interesting in the volume. We have already noticed the firm tread and wide excursions of Mr. Kemble in the provinces of the jurist and the political economist. In the present chapter he has breathed into the dry bones of antiquarian research so true a spirit of poetry and eloquence, that he presents us with the theology, the ceremonies, and the superstitions of our ancestors, invested with much of their simple and earnest faith, as well as their robust, and, at times, sublime thoughtfulness. The prudence or contempt of the first Saxon Christians, indeed, has left but a sparing notice of the state of things which Augustine and his brother mission

aries superseded. The early period at which Christianity prevailed in England, adds to the difficulties which beset the subject. The fall of heathendom and the commencement of history in this island, were contemporaneous; and the missionaries or the monks who could have recorded the errors they overthrew, sought rather to destroy the remembrance of a belief and ritual, which in their eyes were impious; but which yet might have retained too strong a hold on their half-converted neophytes. The materials still available for a history of Saxon heathendom are, therefore, chiefly indirect, casual, and widely scattered. Incidental notices in the annals of the Teutonic races generally, minute and isolated facts preserved not always in writing, but orally or symbolically, in popular superstitions and local customs, in legends, in provincial adages, and even nursery tales, are among the best sources of information now remaining to us. The pœnitentials of the Church and the acts of the witena-gemóts are full of prohibitions against the open or the secret practice of heathendom; yet neither these, nor Beda, nor the various works to which Beda gave rise, supply the sacred names in which the fanes were consecrated, nor the peculiar attributes of the objects of worship. The historian is, therefore, obliged to resort to other authorities, founded on traditions even more ancient, and which yield more copious, if not more definite, accounts. Mr. Kemble's earlier labours as the editor of Beowulf have been of great service to his later and more voluminous work. He had already broken ground in this obscure and unfrequented region, in a little treatise written in German, and entitled Die Stammtafel der Westsachsen.' Sir Francis Palgrave had before discerned the importance of the genealogies of the Anglo-Saxon kings as materials for the history of AngloSaxon mythology. These,' Mr. Kemble observes, contain ‹ a multitude of the ancient gods, reduced into family relations, • and entered in the grades of a pedigree, but still capable of 'identification with the deities of the North and of Germany.' With his peroration of this most important chapter we close our analysis of the first book of the Saxons in England.' The extract is long, but it is a specimen of the author's clear and cogent style, and of the equally philosophical and reverent spirit in which he regards a solemn and imaginative creed.

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'I believe in two religions for my forefathers: one that deals with the domestic life, and normal state of peace; that sanctifies the family duties, prescribes the relations of father, wife and child, divides the land, and presides over its boundaries; that tells of gods, the givers of fertility and increase, the protectors of the husbandman and the herdsman; that guards the ritual and preserves the liturgy; that pervades the social state and gives permanence to the natural, original

political institutions. I call this the sacerdotal faith, and I will admit that to its teachers and professors we may owe the frequent attempt of later periods to give an abstract, philosophic meaning to mythus and tradition, and to make dawning science halt after religion.

The second creed I will call the heroic; in this I recognise the same gods, transformed into powers of war and victory, crowners of the brave in fight, coercers of the wild might of nature, conquerors of the giants, the fiends, and dragons; founders of royal families, around whom cluster warlike comrades, exulting in the thought that their deities stand in immediate genealogical relation to themselves, and share in the pursuits and occupations which furnish themselves with wealth and dignity and power. Let it be admitted that a complete separation never takes place between these different forms of religion; that a wavering is perceptible from one to the other; that the warrior believes his warrior god will bless the produce of his pastures; that the cultivator rejoices in the heroic legend of Wóden and of Baldr, because the cultivator is himself a warrior when the occasion demands his services: still, in the ultimate development and result of the systems, the original distinction may be traced, and to it some of the conclusions we observe must necessarily be referred; it is thus that spells of healing and fruitfulness survive when the great gods have vanished, and that the earth, the hills, the trees and waters retain a portion of dimmed and bated divinity long after the godlike has sunk into the heroic legend, or been lost for ever.

'We possess no means of showing how the religion of our own progenitors or their brethren of the continent, had been modified, purified, and adapted in the course of centuries to a more advanced state of civilisation, or the altered demands of a higher moral nature; but, at the commencement of the sixth century we do find the pregnant fact, that Christianity met but little resistance among them, and enjoyed an easy triumph, or at the worst a careless acquiescence, even among those whose pagan sympathies could not be totally overcome. Two suppositions, indeed, can alone explain the facile apostacy to or from Christianity, which marked the career of the earliest converts. Either from a conviction of the inefficacy of heathendom had proceeded a general indifference to religious sanctions, which does not appear to answer other conditions of the problem, or the moral demands of the new faith did not seem to the Saxons more onerous than those to which they were accustomed; for it is the amount of self-sacrifice which a religion successfully imposes upon its votaries, which can alone form a measure of its influence. The fact that a god had perished, could sound strangely in the ears of no worshipper of Baldr; the great message of consolation,—that he had perished to save sinful, suffering man,-justified the ways of God, and added an awful meaning to the old mythus. An earnest, thinking pagan, would, I must believe, joyfully accept a version of his own creed, which offered so inestimable a boon, in addition to what he had heretofore possessed. The final destruction of the earth by fire could present no difficulties to those who had heard of Surtr and the Twilight of the Gods, or of Allfather's glorious kingdom, raised on the ruin of the intermediate

divinities. A state of happiness or punishment in a life to come was no novelty to him who had shuddered at the idea of Nástrond: Loki or Grendel had smoothed the way for Satan. Those who had believed in runes and incantations were satisfied with the efficacy of the mass; a crowd of saints might be invoked in place of a crowd of subordinate divinities; the holy places had lost none of their sanctity; the holy buildings had not been levelled with the ground, but dedicated in another name; the pagan sacrifices had not been totally abolished, but only converted into festal occasions, where the new Christians might eat and drink, and continue to praise God: Hréðe and Eóstre, Wóden, Tiw and Fricge, Dunor and Sætere retained their places in the calendar of months and days: Erce was still invoked in spells, Wyrd still wove the web of destiny; and while Wóden retained his place at the head of the royal genealogies, the highest offices of the Christian church were offered to compensate the noble class for the loss of their old sacerdotal functions. How should Christianity fail to obtain access where Paganism stepped half way to meet it, and it could hold out so many outward points of union to paganism?'

We have unwillingly passed over many of the sections in the first book of the Saxons in England;' and with even more reluctance we pause on the threshold of the second. But if our preceding analysis and its accompanying extracts suffice to show that an important and in many respects an original contribution has been made to the history of our Laws, our Race, and our Commonwealth, we may securely commend the remaining and more interesting portions of these volumes to the reader. The Mark, the Ealdorman, the Faehde and the Wergyld, the Hi'd and the territorial noble, the distinctions of the free and unfree, are now either swept down the gulph of generations, or so modified as to have lost nearly every original feature. But in the commonwealth of England, there yet remain the king, the peer and the house of representatives, the shire and the municipalities, an aristocracy descending to a middle class, and a middle class rising towards an aristocracy: -these are still left intact, after all the mutations of time, and amid the present concussion of races akin to ourselves in blood, in feelings, and in institutions. We have little scruple, therefore, in merely referring the reader to the chapters in the second volume, which treat of the 'Growth of the Kingly Power,' The Rights of Royalty,' 'The King's Court and Household,' The Gerefa,' The Ealdorman or Duke,' and The Witenagemót.' These questions have been handled also by preceding antiquaries and historians; and to the topics comprehended in them the reader acquainted with the works of Allen, Hallam, and Palgrave, will be less in want of an introduction.

Our conviction of the value of Mr. Kemble's researches is not, however, affected by the pre-occupation of the ground by others.