e thrown together at the end of each chapter.[9] One good of this
method will be that, after the numbered notes are all right, if I see
need of farther explanation, as I revise the press, I can insert a
letter referring to a _final_ note without confusion of the standing
types. There will be some use also in the final notes, in summing the
chapters, or saying what is to be more carefully remembered of them.
Thus just now it is of no consequence to remember that the first
taking of Amiens was in 445, because that is not the founding of the
Merovingian dynasty; neither that Merovaeus seized the throne in 447
and died ten years later. The real date to be remembered is 481, when
Clovis himself comes to the throne, a boy of fifteen; and the three
battles of Clovis' reign to be remembered are Soissons, Tolbiac, and
Poitiers--remembering also that this was the first of the three great
battles of Poitiers;--how the Poitiers district came to have such
importance as a battle-position, we must afterwards discover if we
can. Of Queen Clotilde and her flight from Burgundy to her Frank lover
we must hear more in next chapter,--the story of the vase at Soissons
is given in "The Pictorial History of France," but must be deferred
also, with such comment as it needs, to next chapter; for I wish the
reader's mind, in the close of this first number, to be left fixed on
two descriptions of the modern 'Frank' (taking that word in its
Saracen sense), as distinguished from the modern Saracen. The first
description is by Colonel Butler, entirely true and admirable, except
in the implied extension of the contrast to olden time: for the Saxon
soul under Alfred, the Teutonic under Charlemagne, and the Frank under
St. Louis, were quite as religious as any Asiatic's, though more
practical; it is only the modern mob of kingless miscreants in the
West, who have sunk themselves by gambling, swindling, machine-making,
and gluttony, into the scurviest louts that have ever fouled the Earth
with the carcases she lent them.

[Footnote 9: The plan for numbered and lettered references is not
followed after the first chapter.]

* * * * *

"Of the features of English character brought to light by the spread
of British dominion in Asia, there is nothing more observable than the
contrast between the religious bias of Eastern thought and the innate
absence of religion in the Anglo-Saxon mind. Turk and Greek, Buddhist
and Armenian,