-each with its dialect or sub-dialect.

But beyond this, the continuity of the range of language is broken.
Frisian is _not_ the present dialect of Groningen. Nor yet of Oldenburg
generally--though in one or two of the fenniest villages of that duchy a
remnant of it still continues to be spoken; and is known to philologists
and antiquarians as the _Saterland_ dialect.

It was spoken in parts of East Friesland as late as the middle of the
last century--but only in parts; the Low German, or Platt-Deutsch, being
the current tongue of the districts around.

It is spoken--as already stated--in Heligoland.

And, lastly, it is spoken in an isolated locality as far north as the
Duchy of Sleswick, in the neighbourhood of Husum and Bredsted.

It was these Frisians of Sleswick who alone, during the late struggle of
Denmark against Germany, looked upon the contest with the same
indifference as the frogs viewed the battles of the oxen. They were not
Germans to favour the aggressors from the South, nor Danes to feel the
patriotism of the Northmen. They were neither one nor the other--simply
Frisians, members of an isolated and disconnected brotherhood.

The epithet _free_ originated with the Frisians of Friesland Proper, and
it has adhered to them. With their language they have preserved many of
their old laws and privileges, and from first to last, have always
contrived that the authority of the sovereigns of the Netherlands should
sit lightly on them.

Nevertheless, they are a broken and disjointed population; inasmuch, as
the natural inference from their present distribution is the doctrine
that, at some earlier period, they were spread over the whole of the
sea-coast from Holland to Jutland, in other words, that they were the
oldest inhabitants of Friesland, Oldenburg, Lower Hanover, and Holstein.
If so, they must have been the _Frisii_ of Tacitus. No one doubts this.
They must also have been the _Chauci_ of that writer, the German form of
whose names, as we know from the oldest Anglo-Saxon poems, was _Hocing_.
This is not so universally admitted; nevertheless, it is difficult to
say who the Chauci were if they were not Frisians, or why we find
Frisians to the north of the Elbe, unless the population was at one time
continuous.

When was this continuity disturbed? From the earliest times the
sea-coast of Germany seems to have been Frisian, and from the earliest
times the tribes of the interior seem to have moved from the