fierce spirit of the northern genius combines with the enthusiastic zeal of courteous bearing common to the south; and the imagination is often elevated to its highest pitch by the tremendous solemnities of Gothic superstition. Revelations of enrapturing beauty are mingled with the most frightful scenes of magical incantation, and such other images of terror as could have originated only in the wild conceptions of Teutonic mind. In the opinion of many scholars, romance originated in Arabia, and was brought by that imaginative people from the remote East. That Odin came into Saxony out of Asia, is a Scandinavian tradition; and Tacitus mentions in his work on the manners of the Germans, a legend according to which, Ulysses came in the course of his wanderings into central Germany, and there founded the city of Asciburgum. What Solon was to the Homeridæ, Charlemagne was to the primitive bards of his land, for he caused all the popular songs to be collected and committed to writing. The substance of many of those early poems we still possess in the Lay of the Nibelungen, and the Heldenbuck, or Book of Heroes, but these were produced at a period later than well-defined romance in France. Properly speaking, chivalry was a Norman invention, whose heroes were never tired of roving through France, Brittany, England, Scotland, and Ireland. It began far back in the middle age, and was perfected in the thirteenth century. In the first portion of the mediæval epoch, that of Charlemagne, down to the time of pope Gregory the Seventh, and the convulsive movements of the crusades, the prevailing character of the age was great and simple, earnest, but mild withal. It soon became characterized by a marvelous daring, by lofty enthusiasm, and universal enterprise in real life, as well as in the domain of imagination. The age of chivalry, crusades, romance, and minstrelsy, was a special season of unfolding intellect and mental blossoming; it was the precursor of accelerated progress, the great intellectual spring-tide among all the nations of the West. If the literature of any nation is not preceded by a poetical antiquity before arriving at the period of mature and artistic development, it can never attain a national character, nor breathe the spirit of independent originality. What the heroical period was to the age of Pericles, and again to the age of Augustus, the first centuries of the age of Leo X. were to modern Europe. The fullness of creative fancy was the distinguishing characteristic alike in each successive instance. Legendary literature was exceedingly prevalent and influential from the seventh to the tenth century, that is, just about the time when modern civilization was struggling into existence. Guizot happily expresses the truth on this point. "As after the siege of Troy there were found, in every city of Greece, men who collected the traditions and adventures of heroes, and sung them for the recreation