Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/623

 1920 SHORT NOTICES 615 remarkable success in his researches into the primitive history of the Slavs. He shows that the Vlachs of the Balkan peninsula throughout the middle ages are nomads of the strictest type, moving regularly between summer and winter quarters with sheep, goats, and horses, but not keep- ing kine or pigs. Laying down the major premiss that all the equestrian nomads who meet us in European history came, without exception, from Central Asia, he infers that the Vlachs are Asiatics, Tartars, or Mongolians. Their language is a secondary fact ; their nomadic habits of life are the fundamental fact. They must have learned the Romance tongue from moving in the midst of a settled population who spoke it. This cannot have happened in Dacia north of the Danube, because the period of 150 years through which that country was under Roman rule is not long enough to account for the formation of the Roumanian dialect among its Latin-speaking inhabitants as well as the linguistic Romanization of the nomads. Therefore it happened south of the Danube, in the Latin zone, that is in the north-western provinces, the lands of the Morawa and the Timok. It was perhaps early in the eleventh century, Dr. Peisker seems to suggest, that Vlachs began to move north of the Danube to Wallachia and Transylvania ; though the earliest clear evidence for their settlements in Moldavia or Bessarabia is a document of 1164, and for Transylvania one of 1224. The conclusion of the investigation supports, it will be perceived, the general thesis of Roesler and Hunfalvy that the date of the Romanization of Roumania is very late. To the views of Jimg and Xenopol, who argue for the continuous currency of Latin speech north of the Danube, Dr. Peisker shows no mercy : ' grossere Albernheiten sind noch nie geschrieben worden.' J. B. B. Pere Hippolyte Delehaye's brief study of the Legende de Saint Eiisiache (Academic Royale de Belgique, Classe des Lettres, 1919, no. 4) is executed in the masterly fashion which we expect from the author. The chief points which he establishes are : the wholly unhistorical character of the tale, which is a mosaic of themes derived from folk-tales ; the priority of the Greek texts to the Latin (contested by W. Meyer) ; the likelihood of an Indian origin for many of the principal elements. He also makes a sharp distinction between the cult of St. Eustace at Rome and the cult of other eastern martyrs there, e. g. SS. Theodore, Cosmas and Damian, Sergius and Bacchus, George. These latter are historic martyrs, whose legends, indeed, are as fabulous as that of Eustace, but whose existence need not be doubted, whereas it is not possible to assign any local habitation whatever to Eustace. The wide diffusion of the romance is astonishing, yet perhaps in truth not astonishing in regard of the interest of the story. Three of the themes which are utilized in it have been perennially popular : the family separated by a series of accidents and finally reunited figures in the Clementine Recognitions and in all their posterity, as well as in numberless romances and plays. The special accident of the loss of the two sons — seized on opposite banks of a river by two wild beasts, while the father stands helpless in mid-stream — was selected as the charac- teristic image for representation in art ; a statue at Wells and a mural painting at Canterbury are the English instances of it which I remember,