s arts on
minds which, when no longer strengthened by the sympathy of a crowd,
could not refuse anything that he asked. He pledged himself that the
doubling of their services should not become a precedent; no man's
fief should be burthened with any charge beyond what it had borne from
time immemorial. Men thus personally appealed to, brought in this way
within the magic sphere of princely influence, were no longer slack to
promise; and having once promised, they were not slack to fulfill.
William had more than gained his point. If he had not gained the
formal sanction of the Norman baronage to his expedition, he had won
over each individual Norman baron to serve him as a volunteer. And
wary as ever, William took heed that no man who had promised should
draw back from his promise. His scribes and clerks were at hand, and
the number of ships and soldiers promised by each baron was at once
set down in a book. A Domesday of the conquerors was in short drawn up
in the ducal hall at Lillebonne, a forerunner of the greater Domesday
of the conquered, which twenty years later was brought to King William
of England in his royal palace at Winchester.

FERDINAND FREILIGRATH

(1810-1876)

[Illustration: FERDINAND FREILIGRATH]

In times of political degradation the poets of Germany, turning from
their own surroundings, have sought poetical material either in the
glories of a dim past or in the exotic splendors of remote lands.
Goethe, disquieted by the French Revolution, took up Chinese and
Persian studies; the romantic poets revivified the picturesqueness of
the Middle Ages; and during the second quarter of this century the
Orient began to exercise a potent charm. Platen wrote his beautiful
'Gaselen,' Rueckert sang in Persian measure and translated the
Indian 'Sakuntala,' and Bodenstedt fashioned the dainty songs of
"Mirza-Schaffy." Freiligrath too, a child of his time, entered upon
his literary career with poems which took their themes from distant
climes. Among his earliest verses after 'Moosthee' (Iceland-Moss Tea),
written at the age of sixteen, were 'Africa,' 'Der Scheik am Sinai'
(The Sheik on Sinai), and 'Der Loewenritt' (The Lion's Ride). Even in
these early poems, we find all that brilliancy of Oriental imagery to
which he tells us he had been inspired by much poring over an
illustrated Bible in his childhood.

But Freiligrath, like Uhland and Herwegh, was a man of action and a
patriot. The revolution of 1848