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descendants, who in intelligence, civilisation, and manly virtues 

 were far superior to the original and effete inhabitants of 

 the shores they invaded. 



The men of the North who settled and conquered part of 

 Gaul and Britain, whose might the power of Rome could not 

 destroy, and whose depredations it could not prevent, were not 

 savages : the Romans did not dare attack these men at home 



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with their fleet or with their armies. Nay, they even had 

 allowed these Northmen to settle peacefully in their provinces 

 of Gaul and Britain. 



No, the people who were then spread over a great part o-f 

 the present Russia, who overran Germania, who knew the art 

 of writing, who led their conquering hosts to Spain, into the 

 Mediterranean, to Italy, Sicily, Greece, the Black Sea, Pales- 

 tine, Africa, and even crossed the broad Atlantic to America, 

 who were undisputed masters of the sea for more than twelve 

 centuries, were not barbarians. Let those who uphold the con- 

 trary view produce evidence from archaeology of an indigenous 

 British or Gallic civilisation which surpasses that of the North. 



The antiquities of the North even without its literature 

 would throw an indirect but valuable light on the history of 

 the earlier Norse tribes, the so-called barbarians, fiends, devils, 

 sons of Pluto, &c., of the Frankish and English chronicles. 

 To the latter we can refer for stories of terrible acts of cruelty 

 committed by the countrymen of the writers who recount 

 them with complacency ; maiming prisoners or antagonists 

 and sending multitudes into slavery far away from their homes. 

 But the greatest of all outrages in the eyes of these monkish 

 scribes was that the Northmen burned a church or used it for 

 sheltering their men or stabling their horses. 



The writers of the English and Frankish chronicles were 

 the worst enemies of the Northmen, ignorant and bigoted men 

 when judged by the standard of our time; through their 

 writings we hardly know anything of the customs of their 

 own people. They could see nothing good in a man who had 

 not a religion identical with their own. 



Still allowance must be made for the chroniclers ; they wrote 

 the history of their own period with the bigotry, passions, and 



hatreds, of their times. 



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