There has been of late years so much learned discussion about the origin of this Roumanian people that it were presumption, in face of the erudite authorities enlisted on either side, to advance any independent opinion on the subject. German writers, especially Saxons, have been strenuous in sneering down all claims to Roman extraction, and contending that whatever Roman elements remained over after their evacuation of the territory must long since have been swallowed up in the great rush of successive nations which passed over the land in the early part of the Middle Ages. Roumanian writers, on the contrary, are fond of laying great stress on the direct Roman lineage which it is their pride to believe in, sometimes, however, injuring their own cause by over-anxiety to claim too much—laying too little stress on the admixture of Slave blood, which is as surely a fundamental ingredient of the race. One of the most enlightened Roumanian authors, Joan Slavici, states the case more accurately in saying that the ethnographical importance of the Roumanians does not lie in the fact of their being descendants of the ancient Romans, nor in that of the long-vanished Dacian race having been Romanized by the conquerors, but solely and entirely therein; that this people, placed between two sharply contrasting races, form an important connecting link in the chain of European tribes. The classical type of feature so often to be met with among Roumanian peasants of both sexes pleads strongly in favor of the theory of Roman origin; and if in a former chapter I compared the features of Saxon peasants to those of Noah’s-ark figures, rudely cut out of the very coarsest wood, the Roumanians as often remind me of a type of face chiefly to be met with on cameo ornaments or ancient signet-rings. If we take at random a score of individuals from any Roumanian village, we cannot fail to find a goodly choice of classical profiles, worthy to be immortalized on agate, onyx, or jasper, like a handful of antique gems which have been strewn broadcast over the land. Wallack, or Wlach, by which name this people was generally designated up to the year ’48, points equally to Roman extraction—Wallack being but another version of the appellations Welsh, Welch, Wallon, etc., given by Germans to all people native of Italy. It may, however, not be superfluous here to mention that at no period whatever did these people describe themselves otherwise than as “Romāns,” Roumanians, and would have been as little likely to speak of themselves as Wallacks as would be an American to call himself a Yankee, or a Londoner to designate himself as a cockney. As far as I can make out, a certain sense of opprobrium seems to be attached to this word Wallack as applied by strangers, explainable perhaps by the fact that the appellation Wlach was formerly used to describe all people subjugated by the Romans. CHAPTER XVIII. THE ROUMANIANS: THEIR RELIGION, POPAS, AND CHURCHES.