f the Alps
behind him, and before him the sun and the sea, and the plains of Po; he
was a courtier as a boy in Desiderius' court at Pavia, and then, when
Charlemagne destroyed the Lombard monarchy, seems to have been much with
the great king at Aix. He certainly ended his life as a Benedictine
monk, at Monte Casino, about 799; having written a Life of St. Gregory;
Homilies long and many; the Appendix to Eutropius (the Historia Miscella,
as it is usually called) up to Justinian's time; and above all, this
history of the Lombards, his forefathers, which I shall take as my text.

To me, and I believe to the great German antiquaries, his history seems a
model history of a nation. You watch the people and their story rise
before you out of fable into fact; out of the dreary darkness of the
unknown north, into the clear light of civilized Roman history.

The first chapter is 'Of Germany, how it nourishes much people, and
therefore many nations go forth of it.' The reason which he gives for
the immense population is significant. The further to the north, and the
colder, the more healthy he considers the world to be, and more fit for
breeding human beings; whereas the south, being nearer to the heat of the
sun, always abounds with diseases. The fact really is, I presume, that
Italy (all the south which he knew), and perhaps most of the once Roman
empire, were during the 6th and 7th centuries pestilential. Ruined
cities, stopt watercourses, cultivated land falling back into marsh and
desert, a soil too often saturated with human corpses--offered all the
elements for pestilence. If the once populous Campagna of Rome be now
uninhabitable from malaria, what must it have been in Paul Warnefrid's
time?

Be that as it may, this is his theory.

Then he tells us how his people were at first called Winils; and how they
came out of Scania Insula. Sweden is often, naturally, an island with
the early chroniclers; only the south was known to them. The north was
magical, unknown, Quenland, the dwelling-place of Yotuns, Elves, Trolls,
Scratlings, and all other uncanny inhumanities. The Winils find that
they are growing too many for Scanland, and they divide into three
parties. Two shall stay behind, and the third go out to seek their
fortunes. Which shall go is to be decided by lot. The third on whom the
lot falls choose as war-kings, two brothers, Ayo and Ibor, and with them
their mother, Gambara, the Alruna-wife, prudent and