overthrow of the Dutch Republic, and the
confusion attending it, for a time extinguished the national
literature, and the beginning of the nineteenth century saw the country
flooded with poor translations of foreign books, and all the noble
national literature was forgotten. This evil was partly remedied in the
latter part of the nineteenth century; but as a whole, the Dutch
literature, while it has been influenced by foreign taste, has had
little or no weight outside of its own nation, and has not in any way
shaped the literature of other peoples.

GERMAN.

Germany, like the other Northern nations, had primitive war songs sung
by the bards. Her mythology is akin to the Scandinavian, and like the
latter she assigns a high place to women. Tacitus says: "It is believed
that there is something holy and prophetic about them, and therefore
the warriors neither despise their counsels nor disregard their
responses."

This German paganism was eminently fanciful--it peopled the earth, air
and sea with supernatural beings--the rivers had their Undines, the
caverns their Gnomes, the woods their Sprites, and the ocean its Nixes.
Besides these, there were a host of mythological figures--the Walkyres
or bridal maidens, the river maids; and the white women, Hertha and
Frigga. These legends have formed a rich treasure house from which
later German authors have freely drawn for song or story. Before the
Christian age Germany had no literature and the first national work
that can be dignified by the name is a translation of the Bible into
Moeso-Gothic by Ulphilas, a bishop of the Goths, in the fourth century
A.D. This is a Catholic work that antedated Luther by a thousand years.

Bishop Ulphilas invented an alphabet of Runic, Greek and Roman letters,
and this translation of the Bible remained the only literary monument
of the Germans for four hundred years. The minstrel lays of this period
were later collected by Charlemagne, of which two specimens have come
down to us. Like the Icelandic, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, old English,
and old Saxon, they are in a measure called alliteration, that is, a
repetition of the sound without the regular rhyme at the end of lines,
or such as we call rhyme. This circumstance made Klopstock, at a later
period, try to banish rhyme as not being correct according to ancient
usage. One of these poems, the Hildebrand-lied, belongs to the time of
Theodoric the Great. The songs collected by Charlemagne