Many charters begin with these words: "As the world is now drawing to its close." An army marching under the Emperor Otho was so terrified by an eclipse of the sun, which it conceived to announce this consummation, as to disperse hastily on all sides. As this notion seems to have been founded on some confused theory of the millennium, it naturally died away when the seasons proceeded in the eleventh century with their usual regularity. — HALLAM.

Some squandered their wealth in riotous living, others bestowed it for the good of their souls on churches and convents: weeping masses lay day and night around the altars; some looked forward with dread, but most with secret hope, towards the burning of the earth and the falling in of heaven. Their actual condition was so miserable, that the idea of destruction was relief, spite of all its terrors. VON SYBEL.

Preachers came forth announcing that, in the visions of the night, they had received from the Saviour himself an intimation that his second coming was immediately at hand. Mysterious voices were heard to mingle with the winds. Mailed combatants were seen to encounter in the clouds. Monstrous births intimated the dislocation of the whole system of nature. Men sought to propitiate the approaching Judge, by giving to the Church the lands which were about to perish in the general conflagration. The alarm, though of course transitory, was yet sufficiently deep and enduring to depress the spirits of more than one generation, and to enhance the gloom of that disastrous age. · SIR JAMES STEPHEN.

All unity, all general civilization, seemed gone; society on all sides seemed dismembered; a multitude of petty, obscure, isolated, incoherent societies arose. This appeared, to those who lived and saw it, universal anarchy, the dissolution of all things. Consult the poets and historians of the day: they all believed that the end of the world was at hand. Yet this was, in truth, a new and real social system which was forming. — GUIZOT.

This belief was, doubtless, widespread, but it was by no means universal; and there is abundant evidence to show that it had not prevented men, towards the close of the tenth century, from undertaking works intended for long duration. — C. E. NORTON.

The tenth century used to be reckoned by medieval historians the darkest part of this intellectual night. It was the iron age, which

they vie with one another in describing as lost in the most consummate ignorance. This, however, is much rather applicable to Italy and England than to France and Germany. The former were both in a deplorable state of barbarism. And there are, doubtless, abundant proofs of ignorance in every part of Europe. But, compared with the seventh and eighth centuries, the tenth was an age of illumination in France. And Meiners, who judged the Middle Ages somewhat, perhaps, too severely, but with a penetrating and comprehensive observation, of which there had been few instances, has gone so far as to say, that "in no age, perhaps, did Germany possess more learned and virtuous churchmen of the episcopal order than in the latter half of the tenth, and beginning of the eleventh century."HALLAM.

THE NORTHMEN.

THE piratical expeditions of the Northmen, which formed a marked characteristic of the ninth century, were continued during this century. Early in the century, under Rollo, they sailed up the Seine, and in 912, as the result of their invasions of the northern Frankish territory, they acquired the province since called, from them, Normandy. There they became Christianized. They also invaded England. (See, under ENGLAND, page 249.)

The continued draught of the best men in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, to these piratical expeditions, exhausted those countries, like a tree which bears much fruit when young; and these have been second-rate powers ever since. The power of the race migrated, and left Norway void. — EMERSON.

The wolf beneath the Arctic moon
Has answered to that startling rune;

The Gael has heard its stormy swell,

The light Frank knows its summons well.

WHITTIER.

ENGLAND.

ENGLAND was attacked and invaded by the Danes, and was engaged in struggles with them throughout the century. (See, under THE NORTHMEN, page 248.)

England yielded to the Danes and Northmen in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and was the receptacle into which all the mettle of that strenuous population was poured. — EMERSON.

Canute o'ercame

the race of Ethelred,

and Danes wielded

the dear realm

of Angle-land,

eight-and-twenty

of winters numbered,

wealth dispensed.

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

Ne shall the Saxons selves all peaceably

Enioy the crowne, which they from Britons wonne

First ill, and after ruled wickedly :

For, ere two hundred yeares be full outronne,
There shall a Raven, far from rising sunne,

With his wide wings upon them fiercely fly,
And bid his faithlesse chickens overronne
The fruitfull plaines, and with fell cruelty

In their avenge tread downe the victors surquedry.

SPENSER.

Ir was, then, from the fifth to the tenth century that the work of fermentation and amalgamation of the three elements of modern civilization, namely, the Roman element, the Christian element, and the German element, was in operation; and it was only at the end of the tenth century that the ferment ceased, and, the amalgamation being nearly accomplished, the development of the new order and truly modern society began. GUIZOT.