, save the pursuits of the grave-digger and
the hangman,--when so exemplary a personage as the great Duke of
Wellington gravely said, on his oath and on his honor, that the army is
no place for moral and religious men? The felons who flocked to Rollo's
standard wellnigh a thousand years ago were recruited from the
"dangerous classes" of those remote days, and were probably as useful in
the task of civilizing the world as, according to the assertion of one
of the most eminent of English divines and historians, are rough and
lawless men in that of Europeanizing Polynesia.[E]

Dr. Lappenberg, whose authority is great in all that relates to the
history of the Normans, confirms what is said by Sir F. Palgrave of the
ignorance of the North and the indifference to it which characterized
the Normans. Speaking of the Norman literature, he observes: "In vain we
seek herein imitations of the old Norse poesy, or allusions to the
history or customs of Scandinavia. There may, perhaps, exist more
resemblance between the heroic sagas of the North and the romances of
chivalry of the South of Europe, both having for subjects wonderful
adventures, and the praise of heroism and beauty; but from this
resemblance it cannot be concluded that the Anglo-Norman poets have
borrowed their fictions from the Norman skalds. We have not a single
proof that they were acquainted with any saga or any skaldic
composition. All remembrance of their national poetry was as completely
obliterated among the posterity of the Northmen in France, as if, in
traversing the ocean, they had drank of the water of Lethe. This total
oblivion of their original home they have in common with the West Goths,
who in Castilian poesy have not left the faintest trace of their
original manners and opinions. The same remark has been applied to the
Vareger, who founded a royal dynasty in Russia, and to whom that
country, as a Russian author remarks, is not indebted for a single new
idea. The causes are here the same with those that effected a complete
oblivion of their mother tongue, namely, their inferior civilization,
their intermixture with the natives, their marriages with the women of
the country, who knew no other traditions than those of their native
land. In Normandy, too, the Christian clergy must have suppressed every
memorial of the ancient mythology."[F] Further, "Whatever partiality the
Normans may have entertained for history, they nevertheless betrayed an
almost perf