means of water communication; freer than most parts of the world from those terrible natural phenomena, like the earthquake and the hurricane, before which man lies helpless and astounded, a child beneath the foot of a giant.  Nature was to them not so inhospitable as to starve their brains and limbs, as it has done for the Esquimaux or Fuegian; and not so bountiful as to crush them by its very luxuriance, as it has crushed the savages of the tropics.  They saw enough of its strength to respect it; not enough to cower before it:  and they and it have fought it out; and it seems to me, standing either on London Bridge or on a Holland fen-dyke, that they are winning at last.  But they had a sore battle:  a battle against their own fear of the unseen.  They brought with them, out of the heart of Asia, dark and sad nature-superstitions, some of which linger among our peasantry till this day, of elves, trolls, nixes, and what not.  Their Thor and Odin were at first, probably, only the thunder and the wind:  but they had to be appeased in the dark marches of the forest, where hung rotting on the sacred oaks, amid carcases of goat and horse, the carcases of human victims.  No one acquainted with the early legends and ballads of our race, but must perceive throughout them all the prevailing tone of fear and sadness.  And to their own superstitions, they added those of the Rome which they conquered.  They dreaded the Roman she-poisoners and witches, who, like Horace’s Canidia, still performed horrid rites in grave-yards and dark places of the earth.  They dreaded as magical the delicate images engraved on old Greek gems.  They dreaded the very Roman cities they had destroyed.  They were the work of enchanters.  Like the ruins of St. Albans here in England, they were all full of devils, guarding the treasures which the Romans had hidden.  The Caesars became to them magical man-gods.  The poet Virgil became the prince of necromancers.  If the secrets of Nature were to be known, they were to be known by unlawful means, by prying into the mysteries of the old heathen magicians, or of the Mohammedan doctors of Cordova and Seville; and those who dared to do so were respected and feared, and often came to evil ends.  It needed moral courage, then, to face and interpret fact.  Such brave men as Pope Gerbert, Roger Bacon, Galileo, even Kepler, did not lead happy lives; some of them found themselves in prison.  All the medieval sages—­even Albertus Magnus—­were stigmatised as magicians.  One wonders that more of them did not imitate poor Paracelsus, who, unable to get a hearing for his coarse common sense, took—­vain and sensual—­to drinking the laudanum which he himself had discovered, and vaunted as a priceless boon to men; and died as the fool dieth, in spite of all his wisdom.  For the “Romani nominis umbra,” the shadow of the mighty race whom they had conquered, lay heavy on our forefathers for centuries.  And their dread of the great heathens was really a dread of