a distance. They had the same prodigious energy, the
same passion for freedom, individual and civil, the same splendid errors
in the thirst for fame and the "point of honour;" and above all, as a
main cause of civilisation, they were wonderfully pliant and malleable in
their admixtures with the peoples they overran. This is their true
distinction from the stubborn Celt, who refuses to mingle, and disdains
to improve.

Frankes, the archbishop, baptised Rolf-ganger [16]: and within a little
more than a century afterwards, the descendants of those terrible
heathens who had spared neither priest nor altar, were the most
redoubtable defenders of the Christian Church; their old language
forgotten (save by a few in the town of Bayeux), their ancestral names
[17] (save among a few of the noblest) changed into French titles, and
little else but the indomitable valour of the Scandinavian remained
unaltered amongst the arts and manners of the Frankish-Norman.

In like manner their kindred tribes, who had poured into Saxon England to
ravage and lay desolate, had no sooner obtained from Alfred the Great
permanent homes, than they became perhaps the most powerful, and in a
short time not the least patriotic, part of the Anglo-Saxon population
[18]. At the time our story opens, these Northmen, under the common name
of Danes, were peaceably settled in no less than fifteen [19] counties in
England; their nobles abounded in towns and cities beyond the boundaries
of those counties which bore the distinct appellation of Danelagh. They
were numerous in London: in the precincts of which they had their own
burial-place, to the chief municipal court of which they gave their own
appellation--the Hustings [20]. Their power in the national assembly of
the Witan had decided the choice of kings. Thus, with some differences
of law and dialect, these once turbulent invaders had amalgamated
amicably with the native race [21]. And to this day, the gentry,
traders, and farmers of more than one-third of England, and in those
counties most confessed to be in the van of improvement, descend from
Saxon mothers indeed, but from Viking fathers. There was in reality
little difference in race between the Norman knight of the time of Henry
I. and the Saxon franklin of Norfolk and York. Both on the mother's side
would most probably have been Saxon, both on the father's would have
traced to the Scandinavian.

But though this character of adaptability was