Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 6 (1897).djvu/159

 OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 139 single person. The sceptre which had been declined by the modest Lebedias, was granted to the birth or merit of Almus and his son Arpad, and the authority of the supreme khan of the Chazars confirmed the engagement of the prince and people : of the people to obey his commands, of the prince to consult their happiness and glory. With this narrative we might be reasonably content, if the Their Fennic penetration of modem learning had not opened a new and °"^^ larger prospect of the antiquities of nations. The Hungarian language stands alone, and as it were insulated, among the Sclavonian dialects ; but it bears a close and clear aihnity to the idioms of the Fennic race,"^i of an obsolete and savage race, which formerly occupied the northern regions of Asia and Europe. The genuine appellation of Lgri or Igours is found on the Western confines of China, ^- their migration to the banks of the Irtish is attested by Tartar evidence,^"* a similar name and language are detected in the southern parts of Siberia,"^^ and the remains of the Fennic tribes are widely, though thinly, scattered from the sources of the Oby to the shores of Lapland.^^ The consanguinity of the Hungarians and Laplanders would display the powerful energy of climate on the children of a common parent ; the lively contrast between the bold ad- venturers who are intoxicated with the wines of the Danube, and the wTetched fugitives who are immersed beneath the snows of the polar circle. Arms and freedom have ever been the ••' Fischer, in the Quoestiones Petropolitanae de Origine Ungrorum, and Pray, Dissertat. i. ii. iii. Sec, have drawn up several comparative tables of the Hungarian with the Fennic dialects. The affinity is indeed striking, but the lists are short ; the words are purposely chosen ; and I read in the learned Bayer (Comment. Academ. Betropol. tom. x. p. 374) that, although the Hungarian has adopted many Fennic words (innumeras voces), it essentially differs toto genio et natura. [Cp. Appendix 13.] ■^ In the region of Turfan, which is clearly and minutely described by the Chinese geographers (Gaubil, Hist, du Grand Gengiscan, p. 13 ; De Guignes, Hist, des Huns, tom. ii. p. 31, &c.). 90-98. and Travels, vol. ii. p. 920, 921) and Bell (Travels, vol. i. p. 174) found the Vogu- litz in the neighbourhood of Tobolsky. By the tortures of the etymological art, U^ur and Vogul are reduced to the same name ; the circumjacent mountains really boar the appellation of Ugriar ; and of all the Fennic dialects the Vogulian is the nearest to the Hungarian (Fischer, Dissert, i. p. 20-30. Pray, Dissert, ii. p. 3^'34)- [It is quite true that the Vogulian conies closest to the Hungarian.] ■*' The eight tribes of the Fennic race are described in the curious work of M. Levesque (Hist, des Peuples soumis k la Domination de la Russie, tom. i. p. 361- 561):
 * ' Hist. G^n^alogique des Tartars, par Abulghazi Bahadur Khan, partie ii. p.
 * In their journey to Pekin, both Isbrand Ives (Harris's Collection of Voyages