the idea, yet it was never wholly lost, and the hope of independence was never wholly extinguished from that day to this. It underlay all the many and various rules to which Italy has been subjected— the rule of the Norman in Sicily, and in the southern mainland (who saved those lands from the Saracen and severed them from the Greek), of the Angevin and the Aragonese and the Bourbon; it has survived the papal rule in the centre; and in the north it has survived the imperial rule, and the times of the Free Cities, and the despots, and the rival claims of France and Spain; and has at last been realised so strangely under the house of Savoy, a house just about to begin its career in Otto's days, but then and for long after rather as a Burgundian than Italian power. Turning to the Eastern Empire itself, it might seem at first sight as if the condition of things shown by the map at the end of the tenth century had nothing at all in common with that shown by the map of to-day. For the Eastern Empire was still, in those days, of vast extent greater indeed apparently than it had been for many generations, for by this time the Bulgarian Empire, so long a standing menace to Constantinople, had been not only Slavonicised as we have already seen, but Christianised and also humbled in the field by more than one vigorous emperor of the East; indeed it was already or very shortly afterwards incorporated again in the Empire ; as also for the moment was the neighbouring Slavonic kingdom of Servia. The Empire of the East, too, had outlived the terror of the Saracen, and its boundaries in the east had extended with the decline of the Saracenic power. Nevertheless, the forces were at work which brought about its final fall; the tramp of the terrible Turk might already be heard on its far eastern confines, and the era of the Crusades was at hand. Innumerable changes took place, on the face of the map, in the Balkan peninsula during the long decline of the Empire; independent kingdoms and duchies rose and fell, some evidently paltry, some apparently very great, but all temporary. There was another great Servian empire, and another Bulgarian kingdom; there were manifold little Greek States whether ruled by Greeks or by Crusaders from the West; there was the Latin conquest of Constantinople itself; nevertheless, underlying all these changes and underlying the great devastating flood of Turkish conquest, which swept them all away, the mixed Slavonic and Greek racial element remained at bottom the strongest and most persistent one throughout the peninsula, and it has been left for our own time to see Slavonic and Greek kingdoms and principalities emerging again as the Turkish flood recedes. Looking finally to North-eastern Europe, peopled for the most part by the other great branch of the Slav race, we find at the end of the tenth century something of definite outline beginning to appear in that turmoil of wandering and contending tribes. Many of the westernmost tribes had been or were to be incorporated in the Holy Roman Empire, or had become its tributaries, such as the Czechs of Bohemia, whose kingdom was to play such an important part in imperial history. And now, amongst the tribes of the vast eastern plain the two destined to be the protagonists of that part of the European stage had each of them already begun its national life. Already in the ninth century a tribe of Lechs had changed their name for Poles, meaning in their own tongue the people of the plains -the great plains of the Vistula; and now at the end of the tenth century there is a Polish kingdom under a powerful king. Here its history begins-so full (as Dean Church says) of turbulence and incorrigible anarchy within, of aggression and tyrannous insolence without-and perhaps of all histories the most pathetic at its close. And already in the ninth century some Slavonic and Finnish tribes, welded together under a band of Scandinavian leaders or conquerors, kinsmen of the Norman conquerors in the west and south, began to be known dimly to Greek and Latin writers as "the Russ." By the end of the tenth century they had become a dreaded power; in their ships they found their way down the rivers of the north, through Mongol hordes of Patzinaks and Chazars, into the Euxine, and became a new, though passing, terror to the Empire by sea, as those hordes were an old and abiding one by land. Already that strange prophecy had arisen that in the last days the Russians should become masters of Constantinople. But the time of Russia's abiding greatness was not yet; she had yet to be humiliated by the Pole on the west, and to feel the Tartar yoke from the east imposed upon her for centuries; it was not until the end of the fifteenth century that that yoke was finally broken and Russia freed to enter upon that forward path which, as we know so well, she treads to-day. Such was the map of Europe, looking at it broadly, at the end of the first Christian millennium. There was a widespread feeling at the time that some great crisis was taking place; many deemed that the end of all things was at hand and forsook their employments, renounced their properties, and thronged the monasteries. But it was not the agony of death upon which Europe had entered-rather was it the throes of birth, the birth of the modern nationalities. And we, as we look at the map of that time, feel that it is no longer the map of the old world, but, in spite of all the changes which have since passed upon it, that it is already the map of modern Europe. WRAY W. HUNT. MORE DIABOLICAL FOLK-LORE RELATING TO DEFINITE DIA LOCALITIES. IABOLICAL interpretations of natural objects and phenomena are not uncommon in local folk-lore, and it is not difficult to understand how the nauseous sulphur springs of Harrogate were regarded as issuing straight out of hell itself. The chalybeate waters of Tunbridge Wells are said to owe their ruddy tint and queer taste to the fact that St. Dunstan flung his pincers into them after that memorable encounter 2 recorded in the old rhyme : Saint Dunstan, as the story goes, Once pull'd the devil by the nose With red-hot tongs, which made him roar, That he was heard three miles or more!3 or that the glowing proboscis-and a long snout is one of the most marked features of the fiend in medieval art-was itself plunged into the healing well, when its owner had taken a flying 1 See The Gentleman's Magazine, November 1896. 2 In one popular version of Dunstan's adventure with the devil, the latter is represented as seeing the saint at work in an open shed shoeing a horse, and requesting to be shod himself. So the devil was made fast by a strong halter to a staple fixed in the wall, and the operation was begun. But Dunstan, knowing with whom he had to deal, drove the first nail into a very tender part of his hoof (so that he has been lame ever since), nor would the Saint release him until he had promised, with red-hot pincers at his nose, never to come near the village again, or meddle with smiths, or cross any threshold where a horse-shoe might be nailed up. Southey's lines on St. Romuald are concerned with traditional conflicts of a similar sort; and has not Luther's attempt to hit the devil with his inkstand left a stain upon the wall at the Castle of the Wartburg? * Meg Dodds says of "St. Ronan's Well" (in Scott's novel which bears that title) :-"Folk had a jest that St. Ronan dookit the devil in the waal which gar'd it taste aye since of brimstone." The saline spring at Innerleithen, near Peebles, is said to have been the original in this case. leap out of the Saint's Cell at Mayfield, some nine or ten miles away.2 The triple form of the Eildon Hills in Roxburghshire, as may be read in one of the notes appended to Sir Walter Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel," was popularly believed to be due to infernal agency. "Michael Scott was, once upon a time, much embarrassed by a spirit, for whom he was under the necessity of finding constant employment. He commanded him to baild a cauld, or damhead, across the Tweed at Kelso; it was accomplished in one night, and still does honour to the infernal architect.3 Michael next ordered that Eildon Hill, which was then a uniform cone, should be divided into three. Another night was sufficient to part its summit into the three picturesque peaks which it now bears. At length the enchanter conquered this indefatigable demon, by employing him in the hopeless and endless task of making ropes out of sea sand."4 The worm 1 So in the German legend of the devil's death, after he has been blinded by the man whom he asks to furnish him with a pair of new eyes, the cheated fiend in his agony leaps out of the house, carrying away with him the bench to which he had been bound. (Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie, ch. 33.) 2 According to some authorities, Glastonbury was the scene of this conflict, as of many others in which the Tempter disguised himself under various forms. There is a line of rocks in the river Saale, below Eszbach, known as the Devil's dam, about which a story is told of woman's wit and his own defeat. A mill is said to have formerly stood there, kept by a widow; but the dam was sadly out of repair, and little business could be done. Under these circumstances the devil presented himself before her one evening, and offered to build a new dam that very night, and to finish it before the third crow of the cock, if she would only sign her name in his book. The mill-wife gladly agreed to these terms, especially as she saw what a number of distinguished signatures the book already contained. But no sooner had the bargain been struck, than an awful tempest arose, the river began to overflow its banks, and nothing was heard but the howling of the wind, the rush of water, and the crash of rocks. Then the woman, in her terror, ran into the hen-house, and, clapping her hands, imitated the crowing of a cock so naturally that she roused chanticleer to enter into competition with her as lustily as he could. At the third crow the tumult of the elements was hushed, and the mill saved from destruction. When the morning really came, huge fragments of rocks were seen heaped up across the river, and only two or three stones were wanting to complete a dam which would have caused a most disastrous inundation. (R. Eisel, Sagenbuch des Voigtlandes.) ♦ With this harmless diversion of the demon's restless energies may be compared a superstitious custom which is practised in one part of Portugal. A league to the north of Guimaraes there is a bridge over the river Ave, called "The Bridge of St. John." When anyone in that neighbourhood is sick, and despairs of getting any relief from medicines, he or she is carried at midnight to the middle of the bridge; and a priest accompanies the sick person, carrying a large bag of millet. After a form of exorcism has been uttered, the millet is thrown over the bridge, followed by three handfuls of salt; and the devil is believed there and casts, which are found in multitudes on every sandy shore at low water, are in Scotland accounted for as the abortive efforts at rope making on the part of this or some other fiend once in the service of Michael Scott.1 The way in which the Irish imagination accounts for the curious notch in the Devil's Bit Mountain, Tipperary, is indicated in its very But there are two versions of the legend. According to one, it is said that Nickie Ben, just to try how sharp his teeth were, bit a piece off the upper edge; but, finding it rather too hard even for his digestion, he threw it up at Cashel, in the same county, where it has remained ever since. In confirmation of the story, it is gravely asserted that the Rock of Cashel would exactly fit into the gap left in the aforesaid mountain. In "Notes and Queries," June 14, 1851, the tale is told as follows:-"In the Barnane mountains, near Templemore, Ireland, there is a large dent or hollow, visible at the distance of twenty miles, and known by the name of the 'Devil's Bit.' . . . There is a foolish tradition that the devil was obliged, by one of the saints, to make a road for his reverence across an extensive bog in the neighbourhood, and so, taking a piece of the mountain in his mouth, he strode over the bog and deposited a road behind him!" The Eildon Hills just mentioned are closely associated with Elfin tradition, a branch of supernatural folk-lore which passes insensibly into demonology. Here was the cavern through which Thomas the Rhymer was led by the Queen of Fairy Land into her own realms. He had made her acquaintance as he lay on Huntley Bank; whither, after seven (or three) years' sojourn underground, she brought him back, when he was in danger of being selected as then to leave the body that he has been tormenting, and to amuse himself henceforth with trying to count the grains of millet, a task which he will never be able to finish till the end of the world. There is also a popular Portuguese rhyme which may be translated : If the devil should come To keep watch on me, (Tradições populares Portuguezas, por Z. C. Pedroso.) 'So the Cornish Tregeagle, after having vainly toiled to empty Dozmare Pool on Bodmin Moor with a perforated limpet shell, was afterwards condemned to spin ropes of sand on the coast near Padstow, and lastly to sweep the sands from Porthcurnow Bay round the headland of Tol-Pedn-Penwith into Nanjisal Cove, near Land's End, where he still labours at his impossible task; and at night his wailing may be heard, or fearful roars if storms are brewing. |