The reasons why Icelandic literature, in its most peculiar and interesting form of the saga, did not penetrate abroad are clear enough; and the remoteness and want of school-education in the island itself are by no means the most powerful of them. The very thing which is most characteristic of them, and which in these later times constitutes their greatest charm, must have been against them in their own time. For the stories which ran like an epidemic through Europe in the years immediately before and immediately after 1200, though they might be in some cases concerned directly with national heroes, appealed without exception to international and generally human interests. The slightest education, or the slightest hearing of persons educated, sufficed to teach every one that Alexander and Caesar were great conquerors, that the Story of Troy (the exact truth of which was never doubted) had been famous for hundreds and almost thousands of years. Charlemagne had had directly to do with the greater part of Europe in peace or war, and the struggle with the Saracens was of old and universal interest, freshened by the Crusades. The Arthurian story received from fiction, if not from history, an almost equally wide bearing; and was, besides, knitted to religion--the one universal interest of the time--by its connection with the Graal. All Europe, yet again, had joined in the Crusades, and the stories brought by the crusaders directly or indirectly from the East were in the same way common property. [Sidenote: _Its insularity of manner._] But saga-literature had nothing of this appeal. It was as indifferently and almost superciliously insular as the English country-house novel itself, and may have produced in some of the very few foreigners who can ever have known it originally, something of the same feelings of wrath which we have seen excited by the English country-house novel in our own day. The heroes were not, according to the general ideas of mediaeval Europe, either great chiefs or accomplished knights; the heroines were the very reverse of those damsels "with mild mood" (as the catch-word in the English romances has it) whom the general Middle Age liked or thought it liked. An intricate, intensely local, and (away from the locality) not seldom shocking system of law and public morality pervaded the whole. The supernatural element, though in itself it might have been an attraction, was of a cast quite different from the superstitions of the South, or even of the Centre; and the Christian element, which was to the Middle Ages the very air they breathed, was either absent altogether or present in an artificial, uneasy, and scanty fashion. [Sidenote: _Of scenery and character._]