He then reminds the king of other services that he has rendered, and is again confident of acquittal, when the wolf returns to the charge, and once more urges the outrage perpetrated upon Hersinde. This Reynard positively denies; alleging that he was kindly endeavouring to release the lady, and that Isengrim's jealousy had blinded him. In the end a combat in the lists between Reynard and Isengrim is appointed.

The fox is considerably disconcerted at the necessity of fairly encountering so formidable an antagonist, even weakened as the wolf is by the recent flaying of his fore-paws. But the friends and kindred of the fox assemble round him during the night, fortifying him with stolen poultry; and Dame Rukenau gives him advice for the combat, the only part of which that can possibly be communicated to readers of the present day, is to shave and grease his whole body, so as that it may afford the wolf no hold. To describe the duel is similarly out of the question. Suffice it to say that, by a series of dirty tricks, and sly attacks upon the most susceptible parts of the animal frame, Reynard conquers. He is of course acquitted; and returns in triumph to Malpertuis, accompanied by all his friends, and by many whose good will, real or apparent, his victory has gained him.

The poem concludes with a satire upon all conditions of men, emperor and pope included; all of whom, at least all who succeed in the world, are averred to do so by practising the arts of Reynard, which the French translator terms Renardie.

Heer Willems's volume of the old poem contains further, by way of appendix, the before mentioned poetical conundrum upon a name, a specimen of a Dutch Reynard, with a fable or two upon the same subject; a number of old, and of somewhat, though not much, more modern proverbs, relating to the fox and the wolf, and a portion of the old French Roman du Renard.

With respect to the ability with which Willems has executed his task, our opinion has been sufficiently intimated in the course of our remarks, to supersede the necessity of here more explicitly stating it. We have only to add that his versification in his translation or modernization is easy and spirited. With regard to his Belgian French translator, we

must say that this gentleman appears to have performed his part with a negligence or a precipitation that would, in this country, be esteemed disrespectful to the public. He frequently misrepresents the sense of the original,-we mean even in his translation of Willems's Introduction,-sometimes turning sense into nonsense. And lest we should be told that a Belgian must needs understand Flemish, ancient or modern, better than we can pretend to do, we must state one blunder, which the book itself affords the means of verifying. Willems, in speaking of the copyist's conundrum upon his own name, calls it een raedselachtig gedicht van zestien regels; anglicè, a riddling poem of sixteen lines. This the translator renders une soixantaine de vers enigmatiques, thus transforming sixteen into sixty-a metamorphosis that might occasionally be convenient if feasible! We laid down the pen in amazement, and opened our dictionary, to ascertain whether we did or did not know the meaning of zestien; and even when supported by lexicographical authority, still felt dissatisfied. Eagerly we turned to Willems's appendix, sought out the enigmatic poem, counted the lines, and found them precisely sixteen!

ARTICLE III.

1. Journal af Petrus Læstadius för första Aret af hans Tienstgöving säsom Missionaire i Lapmarken. Stockholm hos Haegstrom, 1836.

(Journal of Peter Læstadius during the first year of his service as a Missionary in Lapland. Stockholm, 1836.) 2. A Winter in Iceland and Lapland. By the HON. ARTHUR DILLON, 1840.

THE Laplander is viewed with interest even in his own country. The striking contrast of this pigmy-sized, blackhaired, yellow-skinned race, to the bulky, flaxen-haired, blooming Norwegian, or the compactly built, sinewy Swede,the total difference of language, habits, mode of living, and, in short, of moral as well as of physical existence, make this

the most remarkable tribe among the European people. It is the least mixed of aboriginal broods of mankind, the least changed by conquest, commerce, or civilization. The Laplanders of the present day are still the Fenni of the days of Tacitus "a people without arms, without horses, without homes, clothed in skins, sleeping on the ground, sheltered only by branches of trees twisted together, from the weather or wild beasts; yet preferring this life to labouring the soil, confinement in fixed dwellings, and the cares and anxieties of civilized life." "They have nothing to lose, and have attained," says the Roman, "that difficult point of having nothing to wish for."

This people has no history. They have never entered into social union beyond the pairing of the sexes and aggregation of the progeny round the parents. This is a social state to which even the irrational animals attain; and man, in the hunter, the fisher, and the shepherd states, can scarcely go beyond, because those modes of life require space and solitude in every country. The hunter and shepherd must have the range or pasture of a hundred hills. To them, and to the fisher, a neighbour is an intruder and an enemy, consuming their means of subsistence. These have never been the primitive states of man as a social being. The theory of three states or + gradations, the hunter state, the shepherd state, the agricultural state, through which the human race has past before social institutions and laws were formed, is a dream,-a theory without other foundation than the authority of the philosophers who have expanded it into volumes. Where men have found their subsistence by hunting, or by pasturing flocks, in that state they have remained from the earliest period to the present day, without improvement, or change, unless from conquest or external influences. These conditions of life are immutable, and have no principle of improvement in themselves. All the African and American, a great part of the Asiatic population, and this remaining aboriginal tribe of the European, prove the unchangeable nature of those primitive occupations; that they are opposed to all social arrangements or improvements; and that a people subsisting by them remain for ever in the same uncivilized condition, without motive or means to emerge from it.

What then have probably been the first civilizing causes in human existence, since they evidently have not been the occupations which produce food in a state of nature? If we cast our eyes over a map of the world, we find the earliest civilized countries to have been those which, although watered by mighty rivers, are not well watered, not supplied at all times and seasons with springs or small running streams to which the inhabitants could resort without interference with each other. Water has probably been the first want which congregated human animals in numbers to one spot; which first induced them to associate for the attainment, defence and appropriation of that spot, where alone water could be obtained at all seasons. Water has been property before land. The Scriptures tell us of a property in wells, before land was appropriated; and the natural truth of this scriptural account is curiously corroborated by the state of property, in a similar state of society, among the nomadic tribes, of which the traveller in Australia, Mr. Mitchel, gives an account, and among the people of whom the works before us treat. From the supply of food which the lakes and rivers afford, the waters have been appropriated in Lapland before the land; and a right of property, Læstadius tells us, in the fishing of a lake, is claimed, where the land of its shores is still the undivided property of all. If Lapland had been like India, Egypt, Mexico, and all countries of early civilization, but sparingly supplied with liquid food, except on the banks of great rivers, to which all the population must at certain seasons resort for obtaining this necessary of life, the appropriation of water would, as in those countries, have produced law, social arrangement and civilization, from the first existence of the human race.

It is evident that, from the very nature of the want, this most ancient of all kinds of property could not have been individualized; it must have belonged to all the members of the society, and which all were equally entitled to use and equally bound to defend against all other societies. This is an important consideration in speculations upon the probable origin of property. In the earliest subjects of appropriation, society has been the first owner; and individuals have only acquired rights from society. Society has not been entered into by man in order to

protect and defend by laws and institutions individual property, and the peaceful enjoyment of it, but to secure to all the common property in the goods of nature. The exclusive right of individuals has only been acquired after the establishment of this prior right of society.

This speculation is not so very empty of consequences, in reasoning upon these subjects, as at first sight it may appear. The right of every man to do with his own as he pleases depends, as matter of principle, upon the question, whether society was instituted for the protection of individual rights, or whether society was not the first proprietor, and individual rights but derived from society,-but modes of holding the general property sanctioned by society, as the best and most beneficial for the interests of all, but, in virtue of the prior inextinguishable natural right of each individual of the society, subject to such modifications as the common interests of all may require. All legislation and government relative to the rights of property turn upon this question. In speculations on the nature of human society, extremes often approximate wonderfully. The prior and predominant right of society in property, and the axiom, that individual rights of property are but encroachments upon the natural rights of man as a member of society, are extreme principles of liberty and equality; yet in fact and in just reasoning they are also the extreme principles on which is founded despotism in governments and laws. It is as head of the state, as the concentrated essence of the society, that the despot meddles with person or property; and societies are only free in proportion as individual rights of property are safe and respected. These encroachments on the natural rights of man, which carried to the extreme, constitute the rights of despots, are the only bases of liberty also, of civilization-of all that distinguishes human society from the aggregation of brutes in families and herds.

Owing to their shepherd state, and the absence of those wants which in other climes have congregated men into society, the Laplanders have never advanced so far as to have any common polity. They have in all ages been a few families widely separated from each other by the nature of their occupation-the pasturing of herds of rein-deer over a vast table land studded with mountains of no great elevation.

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