CHAPTER II.


A magnificent race of men were those war sons of the old North, whom
our popular histories, so superficial in their accounts of this age,
include in the common name of the "Danes." They replunged into
barbarism the nations over which they swept; but from that barbarism
they reproduced the noblest elements of civilisation. Swede,
Norwegian, and Dane, differing in some minor points, when closely
examined, had yet one common character viewed at a distance. They had
the same prodigious energy, the same passion for freedom, individual
and civil, the same splendid errors in the thirst for fame and the
"point of honour;" and above all, as a main cause of civilisation,
they were wonderfully pliant and malleable in their admixtures with
the peoples they overran. This is their true distinction from the
stubborn Celt, who refuses to mingle, and disdains to improve.

Frankes, the archbishop, baptised Rolf-ganger [16]: and within a
little more than a century afterwards, the descendants of those
terrible heathens who had spared neither priest nor altar, were the
most redoubtable defenders of the Christian Church; their old language
forgotten (save by a few in the town of Bayeux), their ancestral names
[17] (save among a few of the noblest) changed into French titles, and
little else but the indomitable valour of the Scandinavian remained
unaltered amongst the arts and manners of the Frankish-Norman.

In like manner their kindred tribes, who had poured into Saxon England
to ravage and lay desolate, had no sooner obtained from Alfred the
Great permanent homes, than they became perhaps the most powerful, and
in a short time not the least patriotic, part of the Anglo-Saxon