glory! The wives of the Romans have not followed them; their fathers are not there to make them ashamed of flight they look trembling at this sky, this sea, these forests, which they never before beheld. Cooped up and already conquered, they are delivered into our hands by our gods... Here your chief, here your army-there, tribute, labour, the sufferings of slavery. Eternal misery or revenge await you on this field of battle. March to the fight; think of your ancestors, think of your posterity."

After Tacitus, who has paraphrased a few expressions of Galgacus, preserved by tradition in the Roman camps, an abyss opens. Fifteen centuries pass before we again hear of the genius of the Britons, and then how! Macpherson, transporting Ossian, the Irish bard, to Scotland, disfiguring the true history of Fingal, tacking three or four tatters of old ballads to a fiction, represents to us a poet of Caledonia with as much reality as Tacitus has represented a warrior. Since, after all, we have nothing but Ossian; since the fragments, which might be given as compositions of the bards, belong rather to different kinds of minstrels whom I shall notice presently; I am forced to avail myself of Macpherson's work. But as the poems which

VOL, I.

E

John Smith added to those published by the first editor of the Scottish bard are less known, I shall extract, in preference, a few passages from

them.

"Crimoina heard the tale of the tomb, she saw her Dargo brought home as dead. Silent and pale she stood, as the pillar of ice that hangs in the season of cold from the brow of Mora's rock. At length she took the harp and touched it soft in praise of her love. Dargo would rise, but we forbade till the song should cease, for it was sweet as the voice of the wounded swan, when she sings away her soul in death, and feels in her breast the fatal dart of the hun

ter. Her companions flock mournful around: they assuage her pain with their song, and bid the souls of swans convey her to the airy lake of the clouds. Its place is above the mountains of Morven.

"Bend,' she said, 'from your clouds, ye fathers of Dargo; bend and carry him to the place of your rest. And ye, maids of Trenmor's airy land, prepare the bright robe of mist for my love. O Dargo, why have I loved, why was I beloved, so much! Our souls were one, our hearts grew together, and how can I survive when they are now divided?-We were two flowers that grew in the cleft of the rock; and our

The

dewy heads amidst sun-beams smiled. flowers were two, but their root was one. The virgins of Cona saw them and turned away their foot. They are comely, they said, but lovely. The deer in his course leaped over them; and the roe forbore to crop them. But the wild boar relentless came, he tore up the one with his deadly tusk. The other bends over it his drooping head, and the beauty of both, like the dry herb before the sun, is decayed.

My sun on Morven now is set and the darkness of death dwells around me in all its smiling beauty. But, ere evening, it is set to rise no more; and leaves me in one cold, eternal night. Alas! my Dargo! why art thou so soon to set? Why is thy late smiling face overcast with so thick a cloud? Why is thy warm heart so soon grown cold, and thy tongue of music grown so mute! Thy hand, which so lately shook the spear in the battle's front, there lies cold and stiff: and thy foot, this morning the foremost in the fatal chace, there lies dead as the earth it trod. From afar, over seas, hills, and dales, have I followed till this day, my love! thy steps. In vain did my father look for my return; in vain did my mother mourn my absence. Their eye was often on the sea; the rocks often heard their cry. But I have

been deaf, O my parents, to your voice; for my thoughts were fixed on Dargo. O that death would repeat on me his stroke! O that the wild boar had also torn Crimoina's breast! Then should I mourn on Morven no more, but joyfully go with my love on his cloud!

"Last night I slept on the heath by thy side; is there not room, this night, in thy shroud? Yes, beside thee I will lay me down; with thee, this night too, I will sleep, my love, my Dargo !'

"We heard the faltering of her voice; we heard the faint note dying in her hand. We raised Dargo from his place. But it was too late. Crimoina was no more.

The harp dropped from

her hand. Her soul she breathed out in the song. She fell beside her Dargo."

Every reader may believe what he pleases of the translations from the Caledonian by Tacitus and John Smith. The historians are greater liars than the poets, without excepting Tacitus, who, however, poured his burning words upon tyrants, as quick lime is thrown upon corpses for the purpose of consuming them.

ANGLO-SAXONS AND DANES.

THE Anglo-Saxons, having succeeded the Romans, and the Danes having come in their turn to the partition of Great Britain, it would be almost impossible to take a separate view of literature during the epoch of the Anglo-Saxons and that of the Danes; I shall therefore treat of them together.

The Danes took with them their Scalds : these mingled with the Welsh Bards. In Wales there were three things belonging to a free man that could not be seized for debt-his horse, his sword, and his harp. Whole nations, in their heroic age, are poets: people sang in battle, they sang at entertainments, they sang before death; they dreaded, above all things, dying in their beds, like women. Starcather, not having been fortunate enough to meet with death in fight, put a gold chain round his neck, and