perhaps, a more fitting place on the walls of Royal Windsor than could have been given to it in the historic hall of the more than half-destroyed palace of Nancy, or among the Lorrain portraits preserved, as a memorial of Lorrain-Hapsburg rule, in the museum of Florence. V.--THE REMNANT OF A GREAT RACE.[8] Modern History is, in its rapid march onward, making sad havoc of old races. New nations are rising up; but only like new banks and headlands on our coast, by the accumulation of drifted shingle, which the very same tide is washing away from wasting older rocks. A generation or two hence, in the making of a new German people, the last remnant will have finally disappeared of an interesting race, which historians and archæologists alike, to whom it is known, will be loth to miss. There are probably few Englishmen who have any very clear idea as to what and who the "Wends" or "Sorbs" are. Early in the last century, we read--I think it was in the year 1702--our Ambassador at Vienna, one Hales, travelling home by way of Bautzen, to his utter surprise found himself in that city in the midst of a crowd of people, strange of form, strange of speech, strange of garb--but unquestionably picturesque--such as he had never before seen or heard of. They are there still, wearing the same dress, using the same speech, looking as odd and outlandish as ever. We need not go back to the records of Alfred the Great, of Wulfstan and Other, to learn what a powerful nation the Wends, one of the principal branches of the great Slav family, were in times gone by. In the days when Wendish warriors, like King Niklot, were feared in battle, their ships went forth across the sea, side by side with those of the Vikings, planting colonies on the Danish Isles, in Holland, in Spain--aye, very ambitious Slav historians will even have it that our own _Sorbiodunum_ (Salisbury) is "the town of the Sorbs," founded by Sorb settlers in 449, and that to the same settlers--also styled _Weleti_ (Alfred the Great calls them _Vylte_)--do our "Wilton" and "Wiltshire" owe their names. On the Continent they once overspread nearly all Germany. Hanover has its "Wendland," Brunswick its "Wendish Gate." Franconia, when ruinously devastated by intestinal wars of German races, was, at Boniface's instance, recultivated by immigrant Wends, famous in his days, and after, for their husbandry. The entire North German population, from the Elbe eastward, and north of the Bavarian and Bohemian mountains, is in descent far more Wendish than German. Wendish names, Wendish customs, Wendish fragments of speech, bits of Wendish institutions, survive everywhere, to tell of past Slav occupation. Altenburg is Wendish to a man, the Mecklenburgs are to the present day ruled even by Wendish grand dukes. Berlin, Potsdam, Dresden, Lübeck, Leipzig, Schwerin, and many more German towns, still bear Wendish names.