ife of the peasants is characterised as Saxon.

The bulk of the population speak a language very closely allied to
Finnish, and they possess a large store of oral literature, much of
which has been collected, and in part published, during the present
century. It has, however, attracted very little attention out of
Esthonia, except in Finland, and to some extent in Germany, and very few
articles on the subject have appeared in England or France. It is
believed that this is the first work published in England giving any
detailed account of the popular literature of Esthonia, and it does not
pretend to be exhaustive, nor to extend much beyond the publication of
Kreutzwald, Neus, and Jannsen.

The Finnish-Ugrian race, though not Aryan, is widely distributed
throughout Europe and Asiatic Russia, and the principal peoples
belonging to it in the North are the Finns, the Esthonians, and the
Lapps, who speak very similar languages, and whose tales and legends
possess much similarity, while in the south the Magyars are more
distantly related to them. The Lapp hero-tales, however, have more of a
historical basis, while the popular tales are much shorter and less
artistic. It is, however, curious that Swan-maiden stories are
peculiarly common among the Lapps. Several other lesser known peoples
belong to the same race, whom we need not further notice.

Esthonian abounds in dialects, but is so close to Finnish that it bears
almost the same relation to it as Lowland Scotch to English, or perhaps
as Danish to Swedish. But there is a strong admixture of German words in
Esthonian, and their tales, when exhibiting traces of foreign influence,
have apparently derived it from Germany. In Finnish tales, on the
contrary, Russian influence is often very apparent.

The orthography is a little unsettled, words like Ukko or Kalev being
often written with a single or double consonant, as Uko or Kallev; while
words like Kaepae are often written with double vowels, as Kaeaepae.

The pronunciation of most of the letters resembles that of English, or,
in the case of the vowels, German, and calls for no special remark.

_j_, as in nearly all languages except English and French, corresponds
to our _y_.

_v_ is printed either _v_ or _w_ in Finnish and Esthonian, but
corresponds to our _v_, and is thus used by the best Finnish
authorities. Of course the Germans properly write it _w_, their _w_
corresponding to our _v_.

For the modified vowels we