Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/24

 Pinkerton contended stoutly for the natural intellectual superiority of the Gothic over the Celtic race, insisting that no intellectual achievement, not even the almost physical achievement of the conquest of a country by force of arms, was ever accomplished by Celts. The black hair, dark eye, and dusky skin of the small-sized Celt, were considered by those philosophers to indicate an habitation for souls less gifted than those which usually dwell under the yellow hair, blue eye, and fair skin of the bulky Goth. This conceit has been revived of late in Germany, and in America; and people talk of the superiority of the Gothic, Germanic, or Anglo-Saxon race, as if no such people had ever existed as the Romans, the Spaniards, the French—no such men as Cæsar, Buonaparte, Cicero, Montesquieu, Cervantes, Ariosto, Raphael, Michael Angelo. If the superiority they claim were true, it would be found not to belong at all to that branch of the one great northern race which is called Teutonic, Gothic, Germanic, or Anglo-Saxon—for that branch in England was, previous to the settlements of the Danes or Northmen in the 10th and 11th centuries, and is at this day throughout all Germany, morally and socially degenerate, and all distinct and distinguishing spirit or nationality in it dead; but to the small cognate branch of the Northmen or Danes, who, between the 9th and 12th centuries brought their paganism, energy, and social institutions, to bear against, conquer, mingle with, and invigorate the priest-ridden, inert descendants of the old Anglo-Saxon race. It was not, perhaps, so much an overwhelming number of these Northmen, as the new spirit they brought with them, that mixed with and changed the social elements of the countries they settled in. A spark will set tire to a city, if it find stuff to kindle. This stuff was in human nature; and these Northmen, a handful as they were of mere barbarians, did kindle