er hero, which appears
in the "Vilkinasaga" of the fourteenth century. It is more likely that
the Danes and other Northern people got their tradition from the Swiss,
by way of the Hanse Towns perhaps, if we are to be permitted to believe
in but one original tradition, which is not less arbitrary than
unphilosophic.

Moreover, for what did these one hundred and fourteen people dedicate a
chapel to him thirty years and a little more after his death? And there
is the Chronicle of Klingenberg, which covers the end of the fourteenth
century, which tells his story; and Melchior Russ, of Lucerne, who, in
compiling his book, about the year 1480, had before him a Tell-song, and
the Chronicle of Eglof Etterlins, Town-Clerk of Lucerne in the first
half of the fifteenth century; and since 1387, too, there has been
solemn service by the people of Uri to commemorate him. So that the
"Fable Danoise" of Uriel Freudenberger of Bern (1760) becomes a mere
absurdity, and the indignant Canton of Uri had no less right to burn it
(although to burn was not to answer it, suggests the critic,) than to
honor the "Defence" by Balthasar with two medals of gold. And what
has been written to establish him may be read in Zurlauben, (whose
approbation is almost proof, says Mueller, reverentially,) and elsewhere
as undernoted.[A]

[Footnote A: In Balthasar, _Def. de Guill. Tell_ (Lucerne, 1760); Gottl.
Eman. von Haller, _Vorlesung ueber Wilh. Tell_, etc. (Bern, 1772);
Hisely, _Guill. Tell et la Revolution de_ 1307 (Delft, 1826); Ideler,
_Die Sage vom Schuesse des Tell_ (Berlin, 1836); Haeusser, _Die Sage vom
Tell_ (Heidelberg, 1840); Schoenhuth, _Wilh. Tell, Geschichte aus der
Vorzeit_ (Reutlingen, 1836); Henning, _Wilh. Tell_ (Nuernberg, 1836); and
_Histoire de Guill. Tell, Liberateur de la Suisse_ (Paris, 1843).]

Tell's posterity in the male line is reported to have died out with
Johann Martin, in 1684; the female, with Verena, in 1720. Yet it is
certainly a little surprising that the elder Swiss chroniclers, John of
Winterthur, and Justinger of Bern, for instance, who were almost Tell's
contemporaries, make no mention of him in relating the Revolution in the
Waldstaette, and that it should be left to Tschudi and others, almost two
hundred years afterwards, in the sixteenth century, to give his story
that dramatic importance upon which Schiller has set the seal forever.
It can be explained, perhaps, on the ground that it did not at the time
posses