The rash speech of William Fitz-Osbern had thus destroyed all hope of a regular parliamentary consent on the part of the Assembly. But it is possible that the duke gained in the end by the hazardous experiment of his seneschal. It is even possible that the manœuvre may have been concerted beforehand between him and his master. It was not likely that any persuasion could have brought the Assembly as a body to agree to the lavish offer of volunteer service which was put into its mouth by William Fitz-Osbern. There was no hope of carrying any such vote on a formal division. But the confusion which followed the speech of the seneschal hindered any formal division from being taken. The Assembly, in short, as an assembly, was broken up. The fagot was unloosed, and the sticks could now be broken one by one. The baronage of Normandy had lost all the strength of union; they were brought, one by one, within the reach of the personal fascinations of their sovereign. William conferred with each man apart; he employed all his arts on minds which, when no longer strengthened by the sympathy of a crowd, could not refuse anything that he asked. He pledged himself that the doubling of their services should not become a precedent; no man's fief should be burthened with any charge beyond what it had borne from time immemorial. Men thus personally appealed to, brought in this way within the magic sphere of princely influence, were no longer slack to promise; and having once promised, they were not slack to fulfill. William had more than gained his point. If he had not gained the formal sanction of the Norman baronage to his expedition, he had won over each individual Norman baron to serve him as a volunteer. And wary as ever, William took heed that no man who had promised should draw back from his promise. His scribes and clerks were at hand, and the number of ships and soldiers promised by each baron was at once set down in a book. A Domesday of the conquerors was in short drawn up in the ducal hall at Lillebonne, a forerunner of the greater Domesday of the conquered, which twenty years later was brought to King William of England in his royal palace at Winchester.
FERDINAND FREILIGRATH
(1810-1876)
n times of political degradation the poets of Germany, turning from their own surroundings, have sought poetical material either in the glories of a dim past or in the exotic splendors of remote lands. Goethe, disquieted by the French Revolution, took up Chinese and Persian studies; the romantic poets revivified the picturesqueness of the Middle Ages; and during the second quarter of this century the Orient began to exercise a potent charm. Platen wrote his beautiful 'Gaselen,' Rückert sang in Persian measure and translated the Indian 'Sakuntala,' and Bodenstedt fashioned the dainty songs of "Mirza-Schaffy." Freiligrath too, a child of his time, entered upon his literary career with poems which took their themes from distant climes. Among his earliest verses after 'Moosthee' (Iceland-Moss Tea), written at the age of sixteen, were 'Africa,' 'Der Scheik am Sinai' (The Sheik on Sinai), and 'Der Löwenritt' (The Lion's Ride). Even in these early poems, we find all that brilliancy of Oriental imagery to which he tells us he had been inspired by much poring over an illustrated Bible in his childhood.
Ferdinand Freiligrath
But Freiligrath, like Uhland and Herwegh, was a man of action and a patriot. The revolution of 1848 had brought fresh breezes into the stagnation of political life; and though they soon were stilled again, the men who had breathed that air ceased to be the dreamers of dreams that the romantic poets had been. They were conscious of a mission, and became the robust heralds of a larger and a freer time.