The mighty and the noble there lay together dead; For this had all the people dole and drearihead. The feast of royal Etzel was thus shut up in woe. Pain in the steps of pleasure treads ever here below." On the singular poem, of which a brief but complete outline now stands before us, many remarks of a critical and historical nature might be made; but we confine ourselves to three short observations, and with these leave the matter to the private meditations of the reader. _First_, that the poem is not "snapt out of the air," as the Germans say, but has a historical foundation, seems sufficiently manifest--Etzel being plainly the famous Attila, Dietrich, Theodoric the Goth, and counterparts to Siegfried and Gunther being producible from the early history of the Franks.[17] Besides this, it is perfectly plain, from the analogy of the Cid, and other popular poetry of the narrative character, that not religious allegory--as some Germans would have it--but actual, though confused and exaggerated history, is the real staple of such composition. The nucleus of the story of the Burgundian Kings, and the revenge of Kriemhild, belongs, probably, to the century following that in which Attila was so prominent a character. But the complete poem, in its present shape, is not later than the thirteenth century. Its author is not known. _Secondly_, the lay of the Niebelungen is extremely interesting, as disproving, so far as analogy may avail to do so, the Wolfian theory above alluded to, of the composition of the _Iliad_ out of a number of separate ballads. Lachmann has tried the same process of disintegration with the unknown Homer of his own country; but a sound-minded Englishman needs but to read the poem as it has been given us, for the first time, complete by Mr Lettsom,[18] in order to stand aghast at the extreme trouble which learned men in Germany often give themselves, in order to prove nonsense. "_Nihil est tam absurdum quod non scripserit aliquis Germanorum._"