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abound, and who enter neither into their system of Mythology, nor into the manners of the times wherein they were written.
What must we conclude from all this? Can we doubt whether these Scandinavian Poets, sometimes lively and ingenious as they were, were the same barbarians who set fire to Rome, overturned the Empire, and ravaged Spain, France and England? Yet this must be admitted, or we must contradict the whole tenor of history. Let us then grant, that the influence of the ruling passion might supply, in those Northern Climes, the absence of the Sun, and that the imaginations of mankind may subsist in full vigour and maturity, even during the infancy of reason.
The End of M. Mallet’s Second Volume.
