Before I venture to say a word in distinct arrest of this judgment, I will give you a chart, as clear as the facts observed in the two previous lectures allow, of the state and prospects of the Saxons, when this violent benediction of conquest happened to them:  and especially I would rescue, in the measure that justice bids, the memory even of their Pagan religion from the general scorn in which I used Carlyle’s description of the idol of ancient Prussia as universally exponent of the temper of Northern devotion.  That Triglaph, or Triglyph Idol, (derivation of Triglaph wholly unknown to me—­I use Triglyph only for my own handiest epithet), last set up, on what is now St. Mary’s hill in Brandenburg, in 1023, belonged indeed to a people wonderfully like the Saxons,—­geographically their close neighbours,—­in habits of life, and aspect of native land, scarcely distinguishable from them,—­in Carlyle’s words, a “strong-boned, iracund, herdsman and fisher people, highly averse to be interfered with, in their religion especially, and inhabiting a moory flat country, full of lakes and woods, but with plenty also of alluvial mud, grassy, frugiferous, apt for the plough”—­in all things like the Saxons, except, as I read the matter, in that ’aversion to be interfered with’ which you modern English think an especially Saxon character in you,—­but which is, on the contrary, you will find on examination, by no means Saxon; but only Wendisch, Czech, Serbic, Sclavic,—­other hard names I could easily find for it among the tribes of that vehemently heathen old Preussen—­“resolutely worshipful of places of oak trees, of wooden or stone idols, of Bangputtis, Patkullos, and I know not what diabolic dumb blocks.”  Your English “dislike to be interfered with” is in absolute fellowship with these, but only gathers itself in its places of Stalks, or chimneys, instead of oak trees, round its idols of iron, instead of wood, diabolically vocal now; strident, and sibilant, instead of dumb.

Far other than these, their neighbour Saxons, Jutes and Angles!—­tribes between whom the distinctions are of no moment whatsoever, except that an English boy or girl may with grace remember that ‘Old England,’ exactly and strictly so called, was the small district in the extreme south of Denmark, totally with its islands estimable at sixty miles square of dead flat land.  Directly south of it, the definitely so-called Saxons held the western shore of Holstein, with the estuary of the Elbe, and the sea-mark isle, Heligoland.  But since the principal temple of Saxon worship was close to Leipsic,[9] we may include under our general term, Saxons, the inhabitants of the whole level district of North Germany, from the Gulf of Flensburg to the Hartz; and, eastward, all the country watered by the Elbe as far as Saxon Switzerland.

[Footnote 9:  Turner, vol. i., p. 223.]