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engaged in the present war with Mexico. Other authorities of less note have been occasionally referred to. In so extensive a work, it is hardly to be expected that errors will not sometimes have escaped notice; but in all important matters, the work is believed to present a true historical

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T is now pretty generally admitted by intelligent historians, that America was discovered and colonized by the Northmen, some five hundred years before the time of Columbus. A recent American writer remarks that "the Northmen; at the time when the discovery is supposed to have been made, were the greatest navigators in Europe. They were just in their palmy state of expansion and activity. Their piratical squadrons showed themselves successively on the coast of almost every known region, and constantly maintained the ascendency that results from superior activity, energy, and courage. During the two or three centuries preceding their discovery of America, they had spread themselves over all the islands of the British Archipelago, and had finally seated one of their princes, the great Canute, upon the throne of Alfred At about the same time, they conquered one of the finest portions of France, to which they gave their name of Normandy. When the Saxon blood temporarily regained the ascendency in England, one of their chieftains, as if to vindicate the honour of the stock, crossed the channel from Normandy, crushed by a single decisive blow the feeble array of his competitor, at the battle of Hastings, and secured to himself and his posterity the British sceptre. Not content with these conquests, the Northmen entered the Mediterranean, took possession of Sicily and the northern coasts. of Italy and Greece, and for a time gave law from the thrones of Jerusalem and Constantinople

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THEY displayed every
where a hardihood and
enterprise, in which they
have never been sur-
passed by any maritime
nation; and, could they
have anticipated by a
century or two the dis-
covery of the compass,
would have given to their
influence upon the ocean
the same universal extent,

which a similar dominion has since assumed in the hands of the Spaniards, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the English, and, for commercial purposes, the United States. With all their wild habits of predatory violence, they were nevertheless a highly imaginative and poetical people; in their later period, they became a refined, accomplished and literary one. Iceland was for a time one of the seats of the monkish learning of the middle ages. In more southern climates, the Norman nobles tempered their original roughness with the gentle graces of civilization, and in the long wars that were undertaken for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre, they led the van of the chivalry of Europe. While yet in their earlier period, at the time when we meet them in America,—they justified completely the beautiful description given of them by Scott, in the Lay of the Last Minstrel, in speaking of the Western Islands :

Thither came in times afar,

Stern Lochlin's sons of roving war,
The Northmen, train'd to fire and blood,
Skill'd to prepare a raven's food,

Kings of the main, their leaders brave,-
Their barks, the dragons of the wave.

Among the less considerable achievements of the earlier history of the Northmen, were the colonization of Iceland, in the year 875, and that of Greenland, in the year 986. The leader of the colony which settled in the latter region was Eric Rauda, or the Red. He established his resi dence at a place which he called Brattalid, situated on an inlet, to which he gave the name of Ericsfiord. He bestowed upon the country the attractive name of Greenland-as a lure to emigrants. His principal companions, in like manner, gave their names to their respective places of residence. Heriulf fixed himself at Heriulfsness, or Cape Heriulf, on Heriulsfiord-Rafn, at Rafnsfiord, and so of the rest. It may be remarked here, that these names are still preserved in the geography of Greenland, and while they serve to perpetuate the memory of the first settlers, identify

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