Northern Europe.  Scarcely was this effected when the sources of history began to be poisoned.  At the end of the eleventh century Saemund Sigfusson, a Christian priest, gathered the popular and hitherto unwritten histories of the North into what is called the “Elder Edda”; and he was satisfied with adding to his compilation the corrective of a Christian hymn.  A hundred years later there was made another collection of the native histories; but the principle which I have mentioned, having had a longer time to operate, now displayed its effects still more clearly.  In this second collection, which is known by the name of the ‘Younger Edda,’ there is an agreeable mixture of Greek, Jewish, and Christian fables; and for the first time in the Scandinavian annals, we meet with the widely diffused fiction of a Trojan descent.

If by way of further illustration we turn to other parts of the world, we shall find a series of facts confirming this view.  We shall find that in those countries where there has been no change of religion, history is more trustworthy and connected than in those countries where such a change has taken place.  In India, Brahmanism, which is still supreme, was established at so early a period that its origin is lost in the remotest antiquity.  The consequence is that the native annals have never been corrupted by any new superstition, and the Hindus are possessed of historic traditions more ancient than can be found among any other Asiatic people.  In the same way, the Chinese have for upwards of two thousand years preserved the religion of Fo, which is a form of Buddhism.  In China, therefore, though the civilization has never been equal to that of India, there is a history, not indeed as old as the natives would wish us to believe, but still stretching back to several centuries before the Christian era, from whence it has been brought down to our own times in an uninterrupted succession.  On the other hand, the Persians, whose intellectual development was certainly superior to that of the Chinese, are nevertheless without any authentic information respecting the early transactions of their ancient monarchy.  For this I can see no possible reason except the fact that Persia, soon after the promulgation of the Koran, was conquered by the Mohammedans, who completely subverted the Parsee religion and thus interrupted the stream of the national traditions.  Hence it is that, putting aside the myths of the Zendavesta, we have no native authorities for Persian history of any value, until the appearance in the eleventh century of the Shah Nameh; in which, however, Firdusi has mingled the miraculous relations of those two religions by which his country had been successively subjected.  The result is, that if it were not for the various discoveries which have been made, of monuments, inscriptions, and coins, we should be compelled to rely on the scanty and inaccurate details in the Greek writers for our knowledge of the history of one of the most important of the Asiatic monarchies.