connected with each other to be considered apart. The prefaces to the Codex Diplomaticus,' and the careful edition of the text of these muniments, would alone raise that work far above the level of a compilation, even if it did not contain so large a proportion of hitherto unpublished materials. To the Saxons in England,' the Codex Diplomaticus' stands nearly in the relation of cause to effect; while the historical volumes, in their turn, are the fruits of scientific philology applied to copious and original resources, and supported by various and pertinent auxiliary knowledge.

. It is curious to compare the contents of the 'Codex Diplomaticus,' and the authorities cited in the Saxons in England,' with the following passage from the fourth book of Milton's History of England:

'Left only to obscure and blockish chroniclers, whom Malmesbury and Huntingdon (for neither they nor we had better authors of those times), ambitious to adorn the history, make no scruple ofttimes, I doubt, to interline with conjectures and outlines of their own: them rather than imitate, I shall choose to represent the truth naked-though as lean as a plain journal. Yet William of Malmesbury must be acknowledged, both for 'style and judgment, to be by far the best writer of them all: 'but what labour is to be endured, turning over volumes of rubbish in the rest, Florence of Worcester, Huntingdon, Simeon of Durham, Hoveden, Matthew of Westminster, and many others of obscurer note, with all their monachisms, is a 6 penance to think. Yet these are our only registers; tran'scribers one after another for the most part, and sometimes worthy enough for the things they register. This travail, rather than not know at once what may be known of our 'ancient story, sifted from fables and impertinences, I voluntarily undergo; and to save others, if they please, the like unpleasing labour: except those who take pleasure to be all their lifetime raking the foundations of old abbeys and cathedrals.'

If history ought to deal with conspicuous men only, and the deeds which made them so, the chronicler of early periods will often echo Milton's complaint: and whether he represent them as lean as a plain journal,' or garnished with mythical ornaments and accretions, he will be unable, however willing, to sift his story from fables and impertinences.' But if, turning from the individual to the race, he build, not upon the shifting surface of personal character, but on the firm ground of recorded law, surviving custom, and ethnical analogies, even the obscure and blockish chroniclers' will be found fraught with

interest and instruction. By that very 'raking the foundations of old abbeys and cathedrals,' which Milton thus deprecated, Mr. Kemble has not only given a solid basis to his own work, but has also supplied all future antiquarians with a series of muniments which afford us authentic glimpses of the actual life of our forefathers.

A reader, accustomed to Anglo-Saxon history as treated by Turner, Lingard, or even Lappenberg, may at first experience some surprise, and perhaps discouragement, at the rare occurrence of personal names and anecdotes in the present volumes of the 'Saxons in England.' In place of kings and stirring incidents, we are introduced to the laws, ethnical or local, which prepared this one of the many homes of the Teutonic race for becoming the theatre of great developments. We are presented with the phænomena of the nation rather than with the accidents of the individual. Mr. Kemble's method is however scientifically correct. For this is the order which nature prescribes to itself in developing the germs of national life; and it is in accordance with the practice of eminent historical philologers. The main disease which affects early history universally, is the conversion of social laws and phænomena into personal symbols. It is this which, in Roman history, for example, has been the source of so much confusion; which has embodied the acts of the Ramnes in the concrete Romulus, and disguised the expansion of the race under a legendary bede-roll of its kings. By reversing the ordinary process, and by analysing, first the elements of the polity, and allowing the symbols of them only their probable value, Niebuhr imparted precision and permanence to what before was indistinct and fluctuating. Tollitur persona, res manet,' is a maxim of archæological science, as well as of civil law. By a similar inversion of the common method, the author of the 'Saxons in England' deals with the physical characteristics of the land so far as they modified the social development of the race; with the social development of the race, so far as it educed the idea, the law, and the institution; and with these, lastly, as they moulded the individual either in his corporate functions or his personal life. Kings and incidents are but the casual, and sometimes the exceptional results of these deep-seated fontal

causes.

We should, however, be doing Mr. Kemble great injustice if we led our readers to suppose that instruction only, and not entertainment, would be found in his pages. We have but slender tolerance for antiquarian discussions which deal with details irrespectively of some central law or connecting principle, and are not enlivened by their relations either to past or present

life. Mr. Kemble's book is vital and practical; and therefore instructive and picturesque. We are not presented, for the twentieth time, with legends which have occupied nearly every historian of Saxon England, from Echard and Guthrie to Pinnock and Mrs. Markham. But in place of Hengist and Horsa, of Æthelbehrt's conversion, of Edwy and of Edgar, we have an animated picture of our now densely peopled and actively civilised England, in an age when man contested the marsh, the forest, the moorland, with their ancient inhabitants; when he preferred the hill side or the clear spring to towered cities,' or, as the pioneer of civilisation in our western Thulè, laid the foundations of the Kingdom, in the narrower circles of the Mark, the Shire, and the Federation. Mr. Kemble has a quick perception of the identity of the substance, under the variations of the form; of the import and application of ethnical analogies in cognate or in dissimilar races; and of the palpable or secret processes which, in successive generations, affect the progress without impairing the permanence of a state. 'Too much 'ignorance, as he has before observed in an earlier work, prevails in England respecting the habits of our Saxon ancestors; too many of our most polished scholars have conde'scended to make themselves the echoes of degenerate Greeks and enervated Romans, and to forget the amphibology that • lurks in the word Barbarous: while want of power to comprehend the peculiarities of the Saxon mind-without which no one will comprehend the peculiarities of the Saxon institutions - has led others to describe the ancestors of the English 'nation as savages half reclaimed, without law, morals, or reli'gion.' But the true mission of the Germanic people was to renovate and re-organise the western world. In the heart of the forest, amid the silences of unbroken plains, the Teuton recognised a law and fulfilled duties, of which the sanctity, if not the memory, was nearly extinct among races who deemed and called him a barbarian. He felt and he reverenced the ties of family life, chastity in woman, fealty in man to his neighbour and his chief, the obligation of oaths, and the impartial supremacy of the laws.* And it is the portraiture of the Teuton doing his appointed work, in re-infusing life and vigour and the sanctions of a lofty morality into the effete and marrowless institutions of the Roman world, which is drawn in the volumes before us.

It is almost superfluous to observe that Sir Francis Palgrave, in his learned and brilliant essays on the Rise and

*

Leges, rem surdam, inexorabilem. Liv. ii. 3.

Progress of the English Commonwealth,' has preoccupied some of the ground now re-surveyed by Mr. Kemble. We have no wish, nor is it indeed within our province, to draw a parallel between these learned and accomplished scholars. It is the sciolist only who endures no brother near the throne; and who dreads and grudges the fame of a successor. The Saxons in England' differs materially in its idea, its plan, and its purpose, from the English Commonwealth;' but the same libraries will contain both works; and some future historian of AngloSaxondom may enter upon the labours of both his predecessors, with equal gratitude for the difficulties they have removed, and the light they have shed upon his path. The annals of a state so fully, and indeed so systematically developed as England, afford ample scope for independent and successive research. It has been said, with nearly equal point and truth, that, in English history, since the revolution of 1688, 'every character is a problem; and every reader a friend or an enemy.' The remark may be modified and applied to periods of much earlier date. The materials for archaic history also are abundant; the questions numerous and intricate; and the theories based upon them are, and will long continue to be, eagerly discussed. But discussion tests and disseminates truth; and the most earnest inquirers are ever the readiest to admit new elucidations, or even corrections of their own views, to welcome the discovery of new resources, and the results of further investigations. We remember, when Niebuhr's doctrines on Roman history were first published, that an American journalist lamented that such an innovator had ever been born, to unsettle the established faith in Romulus and Publicola. We cannot sympathise with this Transatlantic distress. To us it is rather a subject for gratulation, that one age and one nation have produced two such guides and explorers of the past, as Sir Francis Palgrave and Mr. Kemble.

It would be easy, by merely tabular references, to state the points of coincidence between them; but it would speedily exhaust our limits to note their respective divergencies. Both treat of the incunabula of the English nation and commonwealth; and both, therefore, necessarily traverse much ground in common. Both, however, have a genuine stamp of originality, whether they differ or agree. Perhaps we cannot do better than refer to Mr. Hallam's Supplemental Notes' for an authentic tribute to the diligence and accuracy of these richly endowed archæologists. From his award few persons will dissent - the award of a writer of almost unexampled candour and of a discernment and erudition as rarely surpassed.

The following synopsis of Mr. Kemble's chapters may, however, assist the reader who desires to compare the recent publication with its predecessor. The first book of the Saxons

in England' is appropriated to the Saxon and Welsh traditions of the Teutonic invasion and occupation of this island; to the divisions of the land under the several forms of the Mark, the Shire, and the smaller sections of territorial estates-the Edel, Hid or Alod—and to the distinctions of rank, in its primary sense, of the free and unfree, and in its secondary attribute the gradations of the free, from the king to the ceorl. A survey of Saxon Heathendom, as the religious bond of the Teutonic race generally, or as the particular creed of its English representatives, completes the first of the two volumes now published. The chapters of the second book group themselves around the introduction of Christianity, and the progressive consolidation and extension of the regal power. The offices of the duke or ealdorman, of the gerefa and the bishop, the functions of the witenagemót, the privileges of the royal court and household, the municipalities, the poor laws, and the church, are examined under their respective heads, and are the principal points of nominal rather than actual contact with Sir Francis Palgrave's History of the English Commonwealth.

6

Mr. Kemble himself describes his book as a series of essays on the progressive growth of the English monarchy till the time of the Norman Conquest.' In a subject where a multitude of questions are to be answered, and perhaps nearly as many fallacies to be dispersed, the form of essays is preferable to that of continuous narrative. While treating of a somewhat similar period in a nation's annals, Dr. Arnold has seasonably remarked, that explanations and discussions must occupy a large space in this part of our history; for when the poetical 'stories have been once given, there are no materials left for narrative or painting; and general views of the state of a people, where our means of information are so scanty, are little susceptible of liveliness, and require at every step to be defended and developed. The perfect character of history in all its freshness and fulness, is incompatible with imperfect know'ledge: no man can step boldly or gracefully while he is groping 'his way in the dark.'

The first chapter of the Saxons in England' gives a rapid sketch of the Saxon and Welsh traditions of the occupation and conquest of Britain, by immigration or invasion from the coasts of Germany and the shores of the Baltic Sea; and of the miserable condition in which the land was found by these invaders. The exhaustion of vitality in the Roman empire has, perhaps, no