It matters not in the least, whether the old legends were still in existence at the time when the historians wrote their works, or whether they were in verse or in prose. We may find a parallel illustration in our own (German) literature, and refer to the manifold changes which our epic poems had to undergo. The song of Hildebrand and Hadubrand, which Eckard has edited, and W. Grimm has commented upon, is of much more ancient date than the times of Charles the Great; in the tenth century there existed a Latin version of it. We are acquainted with the ‘Nibelungen’ only in that form in which they have been composed in the thirteenth century. How many phases may there not have occurred in the interval between? Then we have the much tamer version of the same subject in the ‘Book of Heroes;’ and at last that in prose of ‘Siegfried,’ which for some centuries has been in an ever renewed form in the hands of the people. Now if the ‘Nibelungen’ and all the information concerning them had been lost, and some ingenious critic recognised in ‘Siegfried’ the old poem, it would be exactly the same case as in the Roman history. The quotation of some verses from the ‘Nibelungen’ in Aventinus,[5] would then stand quite on the same footing as the three verses cited by Livy in the story of the Horatii. Such lays go for a long time side by side with history. Saxo Grammaticus has tried to change the Danish Saga into history, and on that account he cannot be brought into agreement with the statements of the Chronicles. Just so is it in Grecian history. Rhianus, in his poem on Messene, which he undoubtedly composed from old popular songs, is utterly at variance with the list of Spartan kings which Pausanias found in the old records, and with the facts which are mentioned in the contemporary strains of Tyrtæus. Then comes the time long before a literature exists, when men who have a true vocation write history; as, for instance, the author of the excellent Chronicle of Cologne. In this chronicle, which partly dates from the fifteenth century, and which might be made beautifully complete from the archives of Cologne, we find the poem of Gotfrid Hagen on the feud of the bishops, paraphrased in prose, yet with some traces of the rhyme remaining. (Here then is another example of the continual alteration of the form of old poems.) Yet if we compare this with what is stated by that very chronicle on the same subject, perhaps from church books, they can by no means be reconciled with each other. The same thing happened in the Russian Chronicles, which were continued from the time of Nestor, a monk of the eleventh century, down to a much later period, as I myself can testify from a copy in my own possession. The authors of these, as well as the writer of the Chronicle of Cologne, did not live in a literary age, and their works therefore vanished, as they did not write for the public at large. Similar chronicles had without doubt arisen