"Philip de Comines praises his master Louis XI as one of the best of princes, though he witnessed not only the crimes of his life, but the miserable fears and suspicions of his latter end, and has even faithfully recorded them. In this respect Philip de Comines is in no respect superior to Froissart, with whom the crimes committed by his knights and great lords never interfere with his general eulogies of them: the habit of deference and respect was too strong to be broken, and the facts which he himself relates to their discredit, appear to have produced on his mind no impression" (_Lectures on Modern History_, II). In the historical characters which he introduced, the poet probably meant to {P. xvi} adhere to historic truth, as he apprehended it; but we have to make large allowances for the utterly uncritical historic lore of the time, and for the probability, we might say the certainty, that some of the history was based on popular tradition, which is fruitful in confusion of personalities and in anachronisms. These characters are three:-- 1. Attila, called Etzel in the _Lied_. The Atli of the Volsunga-saga much more nearly resembles the Attila of the historians of Rome and Constantinople than does Etzel. He here appears as a just and generous king, whose court is a rendezvous of foreign knights from every land, proud to enlist in his service. Not only is he no party to the treacherous entrapping of the Nibelungs, but he is utterly ignorant of it; and is only driven to countenance hostilities against them by their slaughter of his child and the intolerable insults they hurl at himself. The reason for this presentment of him may be, that Attila really was just, generous, and merciful to his own subjects, and to the large numbers of foreign mercenaries, many of them Germans, who took service under him. Some of these, on their return home, would always speak of him as a great king and a good master, whose court was magnificent; and this character of him might well persist in tradition through the generations, and be an essential part of the popular lays which formed the groundwork of the finished epic.