rrels, silk and gold would
be the recompense of their service. At the same time, the Russian prince
admonished his Byzantine ally to disperse and employ, to recompense and
restrain, these impetuous children of the North. Contemporary
writers have recorded the introduction, name, and character, of the
_Varangians_: each day they rose in confidence and esteem; the whole
body was assembled at Constantinople to perform the duty of guards; and
their strength was recruited by a numerous band of their countrymen from
the Island of Thule. On this occasion, the vague appellation of Thule is
applied to England; and the new Varangians were a colony of English
and Danes who fled from the yoke of the Norman conqueror. The habits of
pilgrimage and piracy had approximated the countries of the earth; these
exiles were entertained in the Byzantine court; and they preserved, till
the last age of the empire, the inheritance of spotless loyalty, and the
use of the Danish or English tongue. With their broad and double-edged
battle-axes on their shoulders, they attended the Greek emperor to the
temple, the senate, and the hippodrome; he slept and feasted under their
trusty guard; and the keys of the palace, the treasury, and the capital,
were held by the firm and faithful hands of the Varangians.

In the tenth century, the geography of Scythia was extended far beyond
the limits of ancient knowledge; and the monarchy of the Russians
obtains a vast and conspicuous place in the map of Constantine. The sons
of Ruric were masters of the spacious province of Wolodomir, or Moscow;
and, if they were confined on that side by the hordes of the East, their
western frontier in those early days was enlarged to the Baltic Sea and
the country of the Prussians. Their northern reign ascended above the
sixtieth degree of latitude over the Hyperborean regions, which fancy
had peopled with monsters, or clouded with eternal darkness. To the
south they followed the course of the Borysthenes, and approached with
that river the neighborhood of the Euxine Sea. The tribes that dwelt, or
wandered, in this ample circuit were obedient to the same conqueror,
and insensibly blended into the same nation. The language of Russia is a
dialect of the Sclavonian; but in the tenth century, these two modes of
speech were different from each other; and, as the Sclavonian prevailed
in the South, it may be presumed that the original Russians of the
North, the primitive subjects of th