tion of the Fins. In short, the horse was a sacrificial animal, and as such slaughtered and eaten at the tomb-the head in this case being deposited with the dead. I shall be happy at any time to show you very many passages relative to this subject; but I suppose what you most want at present is the very remarkable instance I mentioned at Edinburgh of a similar occurrence in the eighteenth century. It runs thus in my authority (The Rheinischer Antiquarius, 1 Abth. 1 Band. p. 206):—

"On 11th February, 1781, died Frederick Casimir, Commander of Lorraine, in the Order of Teutonic Knights, and General de la Cavalerie, in the service of the Palatinate. He was buried at Treves according to the ritual of his order. An officer of his stables, clad in deep mourning, led, immediately after the coffin, his master's charger, covered with housings of black cloth. At the moment when the coffin was being descended into the grave, a skilful blow of the hunting knife laid the noble horse dead upon its margin. The gravediggers immediately seized and lowered it into the vault upon the coffin of its lord, and the earth was shovelled into their common grave.

"The ox, cow, swine, stag, dog, boar, hare, and certain birds, as the falcon, were also sacrificed with the dead in pagan times; and we find their remains not only in the urns with the burnt bones of men, but even in later times accompany ing the skeletons. The origin of the custom can in every case be traced up to traditions of heathendom.'

My experience corroborates Mr Kemble's statement in every respect. For besides bones of the smaller animals, those of birds and fish were also repeatedly found."

Removing afterwards to a place in the same neighbourhood, they came, after some less successful attempts, to the mouth of an old shaft leading down into the calcareous clay :

"Close to it was a grave cut out of the rock. The shaft was cleared, and the flagstone removed from the entrance; close

to which were the bones of a horse. After our previous disappointments, it will be admitted that we had some cause for misgivings; but all doubts disappeared on entering.

"The cut represents the position of the various objects in the tomb. There was no confusion here. The floor was covered with the same beautiful pebbles. On the niches around all the objects

remained as they had been placed twenty centuries ago. It was a sight replete with interest to survey this chamber: to examine each article as it had been originally placed; to contemplate its use; and to behold the effects of time on us proud mortals. Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return,' was exemplified here to the letter. There, in the stillness of this chamber, lay the unruffled dust of the human frame, possessing still the form of man. The bones had all disappeared, or their outer surface alone remained. The space occupied by the head did not exceed the size of the palm of the hand; yet the position of the features could still be traced on the undisturbed dust. There was the depression for the eyes, the slight prominence of the nose, and the mark of the mouth; the teeth being the only portion of the entire frame which remain unchanged. The folds in which the garments enveloped the body, nay, even the knots which bound them, could be traced on the dust.

"A few enamelled beads were found in the right hand of the dead, and some walnuts in the left; and the green mark of a copper ring, into which a stone had been fixed, was on one finger. On each niche one body had been placed. The coffins, crumbled into powder, had fallen in. At the head was a glass bottle; one of these still held about a tablespoonful of wine: the nuts and wine being doubtless placed there to cheer and support the soul in its passage to paradise. There was a cup and a lachrymatory of glass, and an unglazed earthenware lamp stood in a small niche above the head. This tomb was sufficiently spacious to permit ten of us to stand upright."

The extracts we have given will afford a specimen of Dr M'Pherson's discoveries in this interesting field of inquiry. The conclusions that are to be deduced from them are in some respects attended with doubt, and may require rectification from additional information.

It is plain that we have here found an assemblage of ancient sepulchres, containing the remains of men of several different nations. Byron exclaims to the traveller on the deadly Waterloo,

"Stop for thy tread is on an empire's dust."

But here our foot seems to be on the dust of many empires. It is possible, as some have conjectured, that

we have brought to light some catacombs of the Scythian kings. It is certain that we have laid bare the tombs of the barbaric monarchs of Pontus, and of the rulers of the Greek cities, on the spot. And it is probable that we have also met with others containing the bodies of Teutonic chiefs, though of what precise tribe may be a more difficult question.

Dr M'Pherson says, that

"Of all the relics discovered, none have excited more interest, and given rise to more speculation amongst antiquarians, than the Fibula, which bear so exact an analogy to that class denominated Anglo-Saxon, that the general impression appears to be that they belong ed to one and the same people. The Greek emperors, we know, were accustomed to retain in their pay a Teutonic body-guard termed Varangians, meaning exiles or wanderers, who were possessed of many privileges. These were, in fact, Anglo-Saxons, and were joined by their countrymen from time to time, as the crusades and other causes attracted new bands to the East. They became more distinguished for valour than the farfamed Prætorian bands of Rome, and existed in full strength till the last days of the Greek empire. In Villehardouin's account of the taking of the city of Constantinople by the Franks and Venetians, he makes repeated mention of this celebrated and singular body of Englishmen, forming a guard attendant on the king's person; and it is by no means improbable that the Bosphorian kings found it also their interest to have their house

hold troops composed of this faithful, hardy, and erratic race.'

Dr M'Pherson then refers to the opinion of other archeologists that these ornaments date from a period far anterior to the Varangians, and "ought to be assigned to the brothers and cousins of their ancestors fourteen or fifteen generations back."

We confess that we incline to the last of the opinions here expressed, and are disposed to connect these peculiar memorials with the early Goths of the Crimea. The ornaments which have got among antiquaries the name of Anglo-Saxon fibulæ, cannot be considered as peculiar to that portion of the Germanic family, but seem equally to have been the fashion with the Franks and other nations of northern Germany.

To

that division of the Teutonic race the Goths themselves belonged, as their language unequivocally proves; and it seems less probable that Varangian Saxons were employed by the kings of the Bosporus than that we should find in these tombs the national ornaments of a powerful Teutonic tribe, of whose long estab lishment on the spot we have the clearest records. We may observe that some of the fibulæ given by Dr M'Pherson, in the very expressive delineations which illustrate his book, have as much of a Frankish as of an Anglo-Saxon character. And one specimen in particular, embellished, as is common, with five spokes or fingers, radiating from the semicircular top, has a strong resemblance in pattern to a fibula engraved in the Abbé Cochet's interesting and instructive work, La Normandie Souterraine, as found, with other objects, in a Merovingian cemetery at Envermeu in 1850.

It would, however, be premature to form a definitive opinion on this question till we have more materials. So far as we are aware, there have as yet been no excavations of tombs in Dacia or Moesia, where the Goths were long settled in great numbers and power; and it seems certain that, at least after the practice of burial had been introduced among them by Christianity, there must have been many places of interment, which might still be traced in those regions, and which might afford important illustrations of their character and manners, and of the affinity of these with those of other nations. A hasty generalisation is not to be encouraged; and although the cautious use of a conjectural or tentative theory is often beneficial, it must be guarded from the tendency to give it a dogmatic shape. Inquiries, diligently made and faithfully recorded, such as those we have now been noticing, become, when sufficiently extensive, the groundwork for sound conclusions, and help us to lift the veil from that large portion of the history of our species, and even of our Own ancestors and kinsmen, of which the direct written records are imperfect or ob

scure.

How grandiloquent is that national boast, "Every Englishman's house is his castle!" To those, however, who have the misfortune to inhabit what is called a middleclass private house, it seems but imperfectly true; and I think that, like many sayings of the kind, it will scarcely admit of any searching analysis. To the innkeeper, who keeps what is admittedly a public-house, if a castle, his house is a castle which every bagman may storm who can pay for his bed and brandy. To the insolvent debtor it is a castle which a bailiff may penetrate with the laundress's basket, as Wallace penetrated the English stronghold with the load of hay, and where, though the owner may be safe from arrest, he is by no means safe from execution. To the writer of articles for Maga his own house is a castle which every intruder or interloper thinks himself entitled to besiege, and which too many besiegers succeed in taking by storm. Oh for a portcullis, such a one may exclaima moat, a drawbridge! Would he not be tempted to let the portcullis fall on the toes of Assessed Taxes, and nail him to the threshold ?-to duck in the moat a sleek dun, just avoiding the coroner?-to draw up in the face of an unwelcome morning caller the drawbridge, at the other end of which he might stand and wind a bugle vainly but melodiously, instead of announcing his arrival with that abomination of vibration, the housebell?

A private house belongs about as much to the public as a private soldier belongs to his country at large. It is no more its own master's than he is his own master. A castle indeed! If a castle means a place where you sit and fight against all the world without, it is one. It is a castle which every individual is privileged to besiege; and not only every indi

vidual, but every nationality. The great hardship is, that if you fire on the besiegers (as was actually done by an Oxford money-lender when some under-graduates were removing the external decorations of his house), or pour melted lead or boiling pitch on their heads, you will be inevitably indicted for assault and battery, perhaps manslaughter. I question even if the law would support that capital device of Paterfamilias in Punch-the garden water-engine. I am speaking of one of those dishonestly-built modern houses, high and narrow, with their party walls on each side, each of which is permeable to a nursery piano; thrilled from bottom to top by the treble voice of the cook in altercation with the tiger, and the door of which is furnished, if not with one of Mr Ruskin's porches (see the lecture at Edinburgh), to screen besiegers from the eyes of the besieged, at least with a sunken recess which answers the same purpose, and appended to the side-post of which is a tocsin of a door-bell, the honest lion-headed knocker of a century ago having been_superseded. Pliny or Quintilian-I forget which--complains of his lodging over a bath at Rome, and the discordant noises issuing therefrom which disturbed his studies, the voices of multitudes shouting and singing and whistling, ostler-fashion, as they currycombed each other with the strigil, splashing of water, and pounding of dumb-bells; but there was something continuous and monotonous in those sounds which would in time cause them to be unheeded as habitual; and besides this, they did not want him, or call upon him. The life of a British private house is a constant fear of invasion from some unexpected quarter. Here every idler is licensed to sound your tocsin. Not to mention duns, whom you may keep off by paying in

*

cash, there is the baker, butcher, and grocer, calling for orders, the last the most pestilent and pertinacious, and all of whom you know, if you do not bribe, will attack you at the sacred time of Christmas with that time - honoured AngloSaxon weapon, the Bill-and nothing but the bill. There is the tramp, that peculiar blessing of a free country, which will have no passports the honest tramp who does not pretend to have any business, and the hypocritical tramp who pretends to have something to sell; the tinker, the umbrella-mender, the seller of lucifers, the seller of wreaths for ladies (an insult to a bachelor), the seller of stolen knives, the seller of poached rabbits, the buyer of hareskins, the buyer of old clothes, each tempting your servants to rob you. And then all the nationalities-the Italian with his organ, the Frenchman with his Marseillaise, the German captain of the brass-band. Then there is the native collector of taxes for the Queen, and rates for the parish-poor-rate, church-rate, roadrate, water-rate. My last grievance was a library-rate, which I may describe as the Nemesis of taxes on knowledge, by being a tax in favour of knowledge. And then there is the whole host of friendly morning visitors, whom you cannot tell you are not at home without putting a white lie in your servants' mouths. Perhaps my miseries are fanciful; but then I am a man of books; and, what is of more consequence, I occasionally put down my thoughts in writing.

How glad I should be if it were possible to get a suite of rooms in an hotel. I have most distinct and pleasant recollections of the uninterrupted quiet of my rooms in a German inn, where I dined at the tabled'hôte every day, and had not a care in the world. There must be some secret league between hotel-keepers and domestic servants which prevents such an arrangement with us. Surely people who do things on a large scale might do them more economically than those who do them on a small, and hotel-life ought to be more reasonable in price than that of a private-house. But as it is

at present, the thing is impossible. We keep our houses for our servants; they eat the white bread while we eat the brown (stupidly preferring the adulterated white); they inhabit our best and cosiest room-the kitchen. In every respect they have the upper hand of us. I only know of one remedy to this evil. Families should agree and serve each other by alternate months. This would only be carrying out, on reciprocal principles, the fag-system of the public schools, where it is found that a born nobleman can black boots and make coffee quite as well as Dick Buttons the tiger, or Moll Muddle the cook. But in one generation our eyes will never behold such an Utopia. I have, thank my stars, an expedient to escape the bustle of my own private house. The friend of my youth possesses rooms in All Angel's College. He is absent during vacations, and leaves them at my disposal. When I want to write anything that I think Maga will accept, I shut myself up in his rooms and sport oak. It is only thus that I can prevent the consignment of my articles to the limbo of those productions which, like the dishonoured shades in Dante,

"Non hanno battesmo."

You perhaps may not know what I mean by sporting oak. I do not mean wearing the plant in the button - hole, as loyal subjects are wont on the twenty-ninth of May. Sporting oak bears two senses the University. The first sense is that of fast young men, which signifies the breaking down of a friend's or enemy's door after a supper-party by dint of poker or dumb-bell; the second, that of quiet students, which simply signifies shutting the outer door, and keeping it shut in the face of all comers without exception. Next to the sanctum sanctorum of a London club library there is no seclusion like that of College rooms with the oak determinedly sported. To all knocks, if any come, one is deaf, except to the appeal which is seconded by the well-known step and voice of the privileged friend.

To one inhabiting a College, the crowd of domestic besiegers is ap

preciably diminished by the porter's lodge, which is a bar to all mere vagrants. I have a single drawback, though not to be compared with those of a private house. The partition between Coelebs's room and the next is so thin-the two sets of rooms having been formed by the division of a great room - that every word spoken in one room is audible in the next, so that I am compelled to be a listener, malgré moi, whenwhich happens, I must say,very seldom there is company in the next room. This arrangement has produced the anomaly in past times of a roystering wine-party in one room, and a prayermeeting in the next; but that is long, long ago. Being unfortunately sometimes a listener, I am occasionally seized in malice with the desire of reporting, and I take notes to amuse myself of the conversations in the next room. When the subject is not one of private interest only, I do not see the harm of sending my notes to Maga; and if they appear in print, she must bear the blame. One evening I was seated thus with my coffee, my pipe, and Lion the dog, looking with some despair on a blank sheet of paper, on which I meant to write my reflections on the all-important subject of the Sepoy Mutiny, when steps were heard in the next room, followed by two voices, one of which I knew, while the other I knew not. One of them I recognised as that of my friend Celsus, come up to vote in Convocation on some University question; the other was that of a great Unknown, whom for distinction's sake I shall call Cœlebs. Modified in intensity by the partition, they arrived at my ears with the spiritualised dreaminess of the Two Voices of Tennyson, and seemed merely to give utterance to two conflicting sentiments in my own breast. They soon pestered me out of my paper on the Sepoy Mutiny; which, indeed, is no great loss to myself or the public, as I have no practical knowledge of the subject. It was rather like the case of that hoary sinner Anacreon, whose lyre was too much for him, for that when he sat down to speak of the Atridæ, and sing of Cadmus, his obstinate instrument refused to be modulated to other sounds than those of Love.

CELEBS.-Heigh ho! Heigh ho! CELSUS.-What are you sighing about, my dear fellow?

CELEBS.-Simply because I am a dear Fellow, and have been so these fifteen years; for that is the present length of my engagement with Patience Hope. I was five-andtwenty when I was elected, and I threw my fellowship at the fair one's feet, with a magnanimous intention of instantly sacrificing it. The intention was overruled; how or why, I hardly know. I only know that in a month or two I shall strike forty, and Patience, who was a lass of eighteen once, will strike thirtythree. I cannot think what possessed me to pass that last vacant living in Huntingdonshire. There was a clear five hundred a-year, a capital house, garden, stable, nursery, and some of the best fixtures of the Pitchcroft within a mile of the glebe. No dissenters; excellent society; a trout stream at the bottom of the garden; all the poor taken care of by the benevolence of an adjacent nobleman.

CELSUS.-Avarice, my dear boyavarice! have you not read all the letters in the Times, proving how any man can live like a gentleman on three hundred a-year, not to say five?

CELEBS.-I have-I have indeed. But then you know I looked down the list of our preferment in the calendar, and I saw there the name of the Reverend Jonah Blacksheep, whose living of a thousand a-year has been sequestered, and who has attained the respectable age of eighty in a foreign debtor's prison; the name of the Reverend Markham Woodcock, who I heard was afflicted with gout, which showed a tendency to fly to his stomach, and who will be seventy-nine his next birthday, but whom, having dropt in upon unawares, I found knee-deep in turnips last September, blazing away at the birds; the name of the Reverend Ambrose Highflyer, whom I thought seventy-six years or so of fastingfor he is said to have fasted in his infancy-would have laid ere now in a cruciform but not premature grave, but who appeared the other day at Oxford to vote for taking away Mr Lax's degree, who wrote that Pela