ut, piercing the source of the Franks at Waldeck, you will
find them gradually, but swiftly, filling all the space between Weser
and the mouths of Rhine, passing from mountain foam into calmer
diffusion over the Netherland, where their straying forest and
pastoral life has at last to embank itself into muddy agriculture, and
in bleak-flying sea mist, forget the sunshine on its basalt crags.

27. Whereupon, _we_ must also pause, to embank ourselves somewhat; and
before other things, try what we can understand in this name of Frank,
concerning which Gibbon tells us, in his sweetest tones of satisfied
moral serenity--"The love of liberty was the ruling passion of these
Germans. They deserved, they assumed, they maintained, the honourable
epithet of Franks, or Freemen." He does not, however, tell us in what
language of the time--Chaucian, Sicambrian, Chamavian, or
Cattian,--'Frank' ever meant Free: nor can I find out myself what tongue
of any time it first belongs to; but I doubt not that Miss Yonge
('History of Christian Names,' Articles on Frey and Frank), gives the
true root, in what she calls the High German "Frang," Free _Lord_. Not
by any means a Free _Commoner_, or anything of the sort! but a person
whose nature and name implied the existence around him, and beneath, of
a considerable number of other persons who were by no means 'Frang,' nor
Frangs. His title is one of the proudest then maintainable;--ratified at
last by the dignity of age added to that of valour, into the Seigneur,
or Monseigneur, not even yet in the last cockney form of it, 'Mossoo,'
wholly understood as a republican term!

28. So that, accurately thought of, the quality of Frankness glances
only with the flat side of it into any meaning of 'Libre,' but with all
its cutting edge, determinedly, and to all time, it signifies Brave,
strong, and honest, above other men.[15] The old woodland race were
never in any wolfish sense 'free,' but in a most human sense Frank,
outspoken, meaning what they had said, and standing to it, when they had
got it out. Quick and clear in word and act, fearless utterly and
restless always;--but idly lawless, or weakly lavish, neither in deed
nor word. Their frankness, if you read it as a scholar and a Christian,
and not like a modern half-bred, half-brained infidel, knowing no tongue
of all the world but in the slang of it, is really opposed, not to
Servitude,--but to Shyness![16] It is to this day the note of the
sweete