rth ceased to send forth
a constant stream of fresh depredators; and from that time the mutual
aversion of the races began to subside. Intermarriage became frequent.
The Danes learned the religion of the Saxons; and thus one cause
of deadly animosity was removed. The Danish and Saxon tongues, both
dialects of one widespread language, were blended together. But the
distinction between the two nations was by no means effaced, when
an event took place which prostrated both, in common slavery and
degradation, at the feet of a third people.

The Normans were then the foremost race of Christendom. Their valour and
ferocity had made them conspicuous among the rovers whom Scandinavia had
sent forth to ravage Western Europe. Their sails were long the terror of
both coasts of the Channel. Their arms were repeatedly carried far into
the heart of: the Carlovingian empire, and were victorious under the
walls of Maestricht and Paris. At length one of the feeble heirs of
Charlemagne ceded to the strangers a fertile province, watered by
a noble river, and contiguous to the sea which was their favourite
element. In that province they founded a mighty state, which gradually
extended its influence over the neighbouring principalities of Britanny
and Maine. Without laying aside that dauntless valour which had been the
terror of every land from the Elbe to the Pyrenees, the Normans rapidly
acquired all, and more than all, the knowledge and refinement which they
found in the country where they settled. Their courage secured their
territory against foreign invasion. They established internal order,
such as had long been unknown in the Frank empire. They embraced
Christianity; and with Christianity they learned a great part of what
the clergy had to teach. They abandoned their native speech, and adopted
the French tongue, in which the Latin was the predominant element. They
speedily raised their new language to a dignity and importance which it
had never before possessed. They found it a barbarous jargon; they fixed
it in writing; and they employed it in legislation, in poetry, and in
romance. They renounced that brutal intemperance to which all the other
branches of the great German family were too much inclined. The polite
luxury of the Norman presented a striking contrast to the coarse
voracity and drunkenness of his Saxon and Danish neighbours. He loved
to display his magnificence, not in huge piles of food and hogsheads of
strong drink, b