rence. This larger game Hauptmann sagaciously left to others, ranging
himself with those who piece together the scanty and uncertain fragments
of languages that have existed but have failed to perpetuate themselves
in documents and inscriptions. Vandalic had powerfully allured him, and
so had Old Burgundian: he had had designs also upon Visigothic, and had
finally chosen Lombard rather than the others because the material was
not merely defective but also delightfully vague, affording a wide
opportunity for genuine philological insight. And indeed to classify a
language on the basis of a phrase scratched on a brooch, the
misquotations of alien chroniclers, the shifting forms of misspelled
proper names, is a task compared with which the fabled reconstruction of
leviathan from a single bone is mere child's play.

From the mere scraps and hints of Lombard words in Paul the Deacon and
other historians anybody but a German would have declined to draw any
conclusion whatever. But just as every German citizen however humble,
becomes eventually a privy counsellor, a knight of various eagles of
diverse classes, an overstationmaster, or a royal postman, so German
science for the past hundred years has permitted no fact to languish in
its native insignificance. All have been promoted to be the sponsors of
imposing theories. And Hauptmann's theory, which got him the degree of
Ph.D., _maxima cum laude_, was that Lombard is an East Germanic tongue.
This he simple intuited, needing the degree, for the fifty mangled
Lombard words displayed none of those consonants which tending to double
or of those vowels which still vexing us as umlauts, mark a language as
belonging to the great Eastern or Western group. But Hauptmann was first
in the field, and if it was impossible for him to demonstrate that he was
right, it was equally impossible for anybody else to prove that he was
wrong. So he stood his ground and by dint of continually hitting the same
nail on the same head he had so greatly flourished that he was mentioned
respectfully as far as the Lombard tongue was known, and at thirty-four
had passed from the honourable but unpaid condition of Privat-dozent to
that of Professor Extraordinarius.

Now if the Lombards, having ignominiously taken to Latin after their
descent upon Italy, had had to wait for Hauptmann to provide them with a
language, they had left certain more substantial traces of themselves in
the valley of the Po. They died