Basques (Spanish Vascongados), a curious race on both sides of the Pyrenees, forming, in spite of its small numbers, one of the separate folk-stems of Europe. Whatever may have been its ancient dimensions, their district is now limited to the Spanish provinces of Biscaya, Guipuzcoa, and Alava—the three so-called Basque Provinces—with part of Navarra; besides the French arrondissements of Mauléon and part of Bayonne, forming about a third of the department of Basses Pyrénées. The French part formed in ancient times the three territorial divisions, Le Labourd, La Basse-Navarre, and La Soule, embracing the valleys of the Bidassoa and Nivele, of the Nive and Bidouze, and of the Saison, an affluent of the Gave d'Oloron. The Basque region in Spain forms, according to Elisée Reclus, about the thirtieth part of the surface of the peninsula. The boundary with France is a purely artificial one. The orographic system is very complicated; it may be compared to an inextricable knot binding the great chain of the Pyrenees to the plateau of the Castiles. Indeed the whole country is a medley of valleys, gorges, cols, passes, heights, and plateaus. Its general aspect is smiling and gay, save in the southern part of Navarre in the basin of the Ebro. In the French provinces one sees indeed abrupt and bare hill-slopes, but side by side with these the plains are cultivated, the mountains covered with firs, beeches, oaks, and chestnuts, with here and there fields of wheat or maize. A large portion of the surface is still uncultivated; often the soil is clothed only with an abundant natural vegetation consisting of ferns, gorse, and heath, made use of to provide litter for the cattle which are kept indoors the greater part of the year. Here and there appears a smiling homestead, its door always open, round it almost always a kitchen-garden or an apple-orchard. Agriculture is in a backward state—the only plough in the Spanish provinces is still the laya, a clumsy two-pronged fork as old as the Roman epoch. From the point of view of cultivation, the surface may be divided into two distinct parts—the high mountains covered with rich forests, and the plains divided into fields of maize and wheat, vines, kitchen-gardens, with meadows here and there, as well as apple and chestnut orchards. Of all the crops, that of maize is the most important. The Spanish provinces produce wheat, oil, cider, and those naturally heady and well-coloured Navarre wines, stored in great goat-skin bottles, that have at least a high local reputation. Maize-bread (metture), a poor quality of cider (pittara), a highly seasoned soup of vegetables (eltzekarri), and a dish of green cabbages (garbure) are in general use. The foundries excepted, the industries are insignificant, and are mostly worked by strangers rather than the native race. During the last fifty years, but especially between the years 1865 and 1875, there has been a constant stream of emigration, chiefly to South America; and it has been estimated that no fewer than 200,000 Basques are at this moment in the Argentine Republic, in Mexico, and Cuba. Besides, young persons of both sexes, but more particularly girls, are constantly finding their way to the large towns in both France and Spain, of whom many marry and never return. But this is no new thing, for even two hundred years ago Basques were in high repute as servants, and we invariably find in the old French comedies a Basque lackey.
The question is often asked, are the Basques ethnologically of a uniform type? It was long believed that they were all brachycephalic, but the researches of Dr Broca, Dr Velasco, Virchow, and Antoine d'Abbadie, both on exhumed skulls and on living subjects, have proved that among the Basques there are two distinct types: a dolichocephalic, with a mean cranial capacity larger than that of modern Parisians, and a brachycephalic, with a smaller cranial capacity. It is impossible to determine which of these two cranial forms is the characteristic type, and which is anterior to the other. The Basques, then, do not form a pure race, and accordingly we find great variation in height, form, and above all in the colour of the eyes and hair. The Basque, like most peasants of Southern France, is strongly imbued with prejudices, with ancient superstitions, which Catholicism has not been able to eradicate; he is devoted to his peculiar customs, soft and complacent in his manners, but irascible and formidable in his anger; ardent and enthusiastic, but habitually serious; proud and independent, and gifted with a high sense of his personal dignity. His morals are pure and simple; his religious convictions ardent and sincere—there are few families that do not count a priest among their members. His stubborn independence is shown by the tenacity of his assertion of his ancient rights, the Fueros ('privileges') (q.v.); and the noble loyalty of his nature by his reckless allegiance to lost causes, notably to that of the Carlists, grandfather and grandson, in 1833-37 and 1872-76, which cost the Basques the last of their ancient and distinctive privileges. The decree of 9th July 1876 destroyed the last remnant of ancient Basque nationality, by introducing the conscription and the same taxation as in the rest of Spain. Two hundred years ago most of the Basques were sailors; they fished the whale and the Newfoundland cod, and we are even told that theirs was the commercial language of Canada. They have produced a large number of great seamen. If we need not believe that they discovered America before Columbus, it is at least true that Sébastien d'Elecano, the lieutenant of Magellan, who actually circumnavigated the globe, was a countryman. To-day nine-tenths of the natives are devoted exclusively to agriculture. The few who devote themselves to liberal studies make indifferent mathematicians, but show much taste for purely literary studies, especially poetry and works of imagination. This race has produced some creditable men of letters, as the Spanish poet Alonzo d'Ercilla; but a prouder boast is its claim to the paternity of one of the most remarkable institutions of modern times—Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the order of Jesus, and Francis Xavier, the most devoted of its missionaries, were Basques.
The Basque still preserves part of his ancient and characteristic costume in the béret (boina), a blue or red cap, like the Scotch broad bonnet; the belt (zinta)—almost always red in France and blue in Navarra—and the short jacket thrown over his shoulder. His shoes are the hempen espartinuc (Fr. espadrilles, Span. alpargatas). He wears no cravat, and is usually closely shaved; indeed the first care of the young Basque soldier on his discharge is to cut off the compulsory moustaches of the service. The old men usually wear the hair long. Young and old are armed with the makhila, a staff of medlar, loaded at its lower end, which can be hung to the wrist by a leather knot, and which, in the hands of an active fellow, is a formidable weapon. They are passionately fond of games, especially dancing and hand-ball (pelote); and there is no village without its rebot, where not only young but middle-aged men play in organised matches in presence of the whole village with marvellous vigour and agility. The only one of their distinctive dances that still survives is the grave mutchiko, the so-called 'Basque dance,' reserved for men alone. They sing much, their original songs being mostly in a minor key, the tone sad and sweet, the words expressing usually the sorrows of love. But the most remarkable of their distinctive institutions are the Pastorales, or Basque dramas, which now survive, however, only in La Soule, in the two French cantons of Tardets and Mauléon, where they are played every year, on the occasion of some great festival, spite of the opposition of the curés. Each pastorale is preceded by a long prologue, and terminated by a morality appropriate to the subject. The emphasis, the gestures, and the rhythm, are traditional as well as the costumes of the actors. The action is always very lively; the movements follow the rhythm of the singing, and in the scenes representing battles the combatants advance and recede regularly, while they repeat the first two and the last two verses of a quatrain, which Mr Webster compares to the strophe and antistrophe of a Greek tragedy. The good march calmly and majestically; the bad, with great steps and with horrible gestures; while the devils dance, leap, and run about continually. Usually the spectacle, which is preceded by a promenade of the whole troupe through the village, does not last less than seven or eight hours, yet the attention of the auditors is unbroken. Their impressions betray themselves by expressive interruptions; the death of a hero is usually accompanied by universal cries of 'Ai, ai!' and the discharge of pistol-shots. These pastorales have never been printed, but are learned by word of mouth during the long evenings of winter. They are all in Basque, from 3500 to 6500 lines in length (Warwick has 7116 lines), most of them in verses of eight feet, divided equally into strophes of four verses, of which the second rhymes with the fourth, the two others not rhyming. The measure is often very defective, and the rhyme merely a defective assonance. The unities of time and place are unknown, and the division into acts does not exist. The strangest anachronisms occur, and events succeed each other without the least transition. In one, that of Claudieus and Marsimissa, Mr Webster found a Roman emperor, a king of France, a Duc de Richelieu, a Pope Julius, a King Nero, Cardinal Baronius, and the grand Turk Mustafa. Charlemagne is represented with blue spectacles, a blue dress, white cotton gloves, a makhila, two gold chains, and the cross of the Legion of Honour or a Crimean medal. All of them tend ingeniously to the honour of the Christian religion, and to the disgrace of Saracens and Mohammedanism. In all there figure pagan Turks, whom the devils aid, and whom the Christians always conquer or convert in the end. The date of these strange compositions thus points back apparently to the Spanish 'war of reconquest,' from the 13th to the 15th century. Many of them are mere survivals of the old medieval mysteries and moralities, even down to the very buffooneries, more or less gross, which distract the attention of the auditor. Mr Webster has since communicated to the writer his discovery that the pastorales are all composed directly from the French chap-books hawked about the country, the originals having actually been shown him by their authors. Of course indirectly through these they go back to the old chansons de geste. A good account of these chap-books is given in vol. ii. of Ch. Nisard's Histoire des Livres populaires (Paris, 1854).
Language and Literature.—The wonderful language of the Basques (by themselves called Eskuara, Euskara, Uskara, a word of uncertain origin, from which are formed the French adjective Euscarien, and the national name of the Basques, Eskualdunak or Euskaldunak, 'those who have the Euskara') stands as yet absolutely isolated from all the tongues of Europe, and furnishes perhaps the only example of a consistently incorporating language. It belongs to the agglutinative division of languages joining on the varying to the permanent element of the word, and post-fixing for the most part the sounds which express the relations of grammar. It shows in some of its compounds a strange but merely casual analogy with the polysynthetic languages of America, and must be placed morphologically between the Finnic family, which is simply incorporating, and the North American incorporating and polysynthetic languages. Of course this statement is quite a different thing from a conclusion that Basque has any identity other than a singular analogy either with the Finnic or Magyar on the one side, or the Algonquin or Irokyese on the other. It constitutes an independent stem of the agglutinative class, while the Uralic languages belong to another independent stem of the same class. Basque has no graphic system of its own, but employs the Roman character. Its general alphabet is very complicated; Prince Louis-Lucien Bonaparte counts 13 simple vowels and 38 consonants, and to these 51 phonetic elements we must add 6 diphthong-vowels and the aspirated consonants. The doubling of consonants is not permitted, and in actual speech many soft consonants are dropped. The letter r cannot begin a word. The cases are formed by post-positions, which may be added one to the other, and in the modern dialects the singular is distinguished from the plural only in the definite declension, where the post-fixed article is a in the singular and ak in the plural; as gizona, 'the man,' gizonak, 'the men;' enakumea, 'the woman,' emakumeak, 'the women.' The inflectional order of our language is thus inverted; instead of the grammatical modifications expressed by cases or by prepositions, Basque employs post-positions—suffixes always agglutinated to the noun: zaldi, 'horse;' zaldia, 'the horse;' zaldiaren, 'of the horse;' zaldiko, 'of horse;' zaldibat, 'one horse,' &c. Some of the common suffixes are k, the mark of the plural and of the agent; n, 'in;' i, 'to;' z, 'by;' ik, 'some;' ko, go, dik, tik, 'of;' kotzat, tzat, tzako, kiko, 'for;' kin, kaz, gaz, 'with;' gatik, 'for;' gan, baithan, 'in;' gandik, 'from;' ra, rako, ronz, 'towards;' gana, 'to,' 'at,' &c. Of these suffixes some are joined to the definite, others to the indefinite noun, or also to both. The personal pronouns are ni, 'I'; gu, 'we'; hi, 'thou'; zu, 'you.' There are still four demonstrative pronouns: a, hura, hau, hori, but traces of others now lost are seen in the flexions of the verb; d, as a third person, subject and object; t, as a first person, subject; as dakust, 'it see I,' from d-ikus-t; doa, 'he goes,' from d-oa. The pronoun 'self' is rendered by buru, 'head.' The relative pronoun is rendered by the suffix n agglutinated to the verbal flexion; its oblique cases by the interrogative pronoun zein. The other interrogatives are nor, 'who,' and zer, 'what'; as nor da hor? 'who is there?' zein da haur? 'what is this?' Bat, 'some one'; batzu, 'some' (plural); bakoeh, 'each'; batbedera, 'every one'; bana, 'one by one'; hanitz, 'many'; norbait, 'some-one'; elkar, 'each other,' are indefinite pronouns. The Basque has no genders, but it uses verbal forms of address, in which the sex of the person addressed is indicated by a special suffix, thus: 'I do not know him,' spoken to a woman, is eztakinat; to a man, eztakiat (for eztakikat). The grammar would be simple but for the verb, which in the conjugation is exceedingly complicated. It incorporates the pronouns, having a different form for 'I have it,' 'I have it to you,' &c., as well as for addressing a woman, a man, a superior, and an equal. Thus, dut, 'I have,' generally speaking; diat, 'I have,' to a man; dinat, 'I have,' to a woman.
In its present state Basque does not employ its regular verbal inflections, and has practically but two verbs, 'to be' and 'to have,' all other verbs being generally used as participles expressed in a periphrasis. This system consists in combining a verbal noun with an auxiliary verb, and, instead of saying dakust, 'I see it,' to say ikusen dut, 'I have it in seeing.' It is true that even at present the non-periphrastic conjugation is sometimes employed, and eztakinat is still in use, as well as dakust, for ikusen dut. Spite of the apparent simplicity of the periphrastic conjugation, the number of forms possessed by the verbal noun and auxiliary verb are almost endless, and not only is there a different form for each of the personal pronouns, whether in the objective or the dative case, but there are also different forms for addressing a woman, an equal, a superior, or an inferior. The verbal adjective is the form given in the dictionary, and corresponds to a past participle, as ikusi, 'seen;' followed by the suffixes ko or n it forms a future and a conditional, as ikusiko dut, or ikusiren dut, 'I shall see it;' the verbal substantive is merely a locative, as ikusen, 'in the sight,' 'in seeing.' The various auxiliaries of use in the periphrastic conjugation are ukan, 'to have'; eduki, 'to hold'; izan, 'to be'; edin, 'can' (though this is doubtful); ezan, 'may'; croan, 'to move'; joan, 'to go'; ibilli, 'to move'—the last two already obsolete. Of the two principal auxiliaries, eduki is inflected like all other transitive verbs: dadukat, 'I hold it,' is formed from d-eduk-t, the a before t being merely a binding vowel, as kt could not be pronounced. The present tense forms of 'to have' are: for the singular, daut, dauk, dau; and for the plural, dauqu, dauzu, dau; or, more generally, dut, duk, du, dugu, duzu, dute. The imperfect tense forms are: singular, neban, eban, eban; plural, genduan, zenduan, eben; or, more generally, muen, huen, zuen, ginduen, zinduen, zuten. The present optative forms are: singular, duket, dukek, duke; plural, dukegu, dukezu, dukete; and imperfect: singular, nuke, huke, luke; plural, ginuke, zinuke, lukete. Such is the complete verb; its compound tenses are irregularly made up with the auxiliary izan, 'to be'; thus, 'I have had,' izan dut; 'I had had,' izan nuen. The transitive verbs are thus com- ponded after the periphrastic method—e.g. from the verbal adjective ikusi, 'seen'; 'I see it,' ikusen dut; 'I saw it,' ikusen nuen; 'I have seen it,' ikusi dut; 'I shall see it,' ikusiren dut; 'I should have seen it,' ikusi izanen nuen; 'that I may see it,' ikusi dezadan; 'I can see it,' ikusi dezaket; 'I could see it,' ikusinezake. The only irregular verb is izan, 'to be.' Its present indicative is: singular, naiz, aiz, da; plural, gara, zara, dirade. The primitive conjugation of Basque verbs is now represented only by the auxiliaries of the modern periphrastic conjugation, which, according to Prince Louis-Lucien Bonaparte, has developed in all its dialects, eleven moods and ninety-one tenses (each of which has three persons in each number), variable according to the sex or rank of the person addressed; it receives besides a certain number of terminations, which perform the office of our conjunctions. The syntax of Basque, as of all agglutinative languages, is simple. The phrases are short. Composition is so common that it has caused several juxtaposed words to be contracted and reduced, so as to be partially confounded one with the other. This is the phenomenon known as polysynthetism, seen in the dialects of America, in which the words that make up a sentence are stripped of their grammatical terminations, and then fused into a single word of cumbrous length. Many words are simply formed thus: odotsa, 'thunder,' is made up of odei, 'cloud,' and otsa, 'noise'; and illabete, 'month,' seems to be a compound of illargi-bete, 'full moon'; illargi, 'moon,' itself being composed of il or hil, 'death,' and argi, 'light.' The vocabulary is poor, and we find that there are no pure Basque words for abstract ideas; though this is denied by Prince Louis-Lucien Bonaparte. For example, there are no original words for 'tree,' 'animal,' 'soul'; God is simply 'the master on high,' and if they have a word for 'will,' the same must express 'desire,' 'fancy,' 'thought.'
The study of the language is rendered the more difficult by the extreme variability of its dialects. There are perhaps no two villages where it is spoken entirely alike. Prince Louis-Lucien Bonaparte recognises no less than twenty-five dialects, which, however, fall easily into eight great dialects, which again may be reduced to three. The eight dialects are: (1) The Labourdin, spoken in the south-west part of the arrondissement of Bayonne; (2) the Souletin, in the south-east of the arrondissement of Mauléon; (3) the Eastern Lower-Navarrese, in the north-west of the arrondissement of Mauléon; (4) the Western Lower-Navarrese, in the north-east of the arrondissement of Bayonne; (5) the Northern Upper-Navarrese, in some villages of Guipuzcoa on the French frontier, and in the part of Navarra bordering on the same province; (6) the Southern Upper-Navarrese, in the rest of Basque Navarra; (7) the Guipuzcoan, in the middle and eastern parts of Guipuzcoa; (8) the Biscayan, in Biscaya, Alava, and the western third of Guipuzcoa. The Souletin and the two Lower-Navarrese dialects form the first group, which may be called the Oriental division. The Biscayan alone forms the Western, and the four others form the Central group. These names are drawn from the territorial subdivisions, but the dialects do not correspond exactly. None of these provinces is entirely Basque except Guipuzcoa; Spanish Navarra is hardly half; only a tenth part of Alava along the northern frontier. A little less than a fourth part must be taken from Biscaya, and some Gascon villages from the arrondissements of Mauléon and Bayonne in France. Neither Bayonne, Pampeluna, nor Bilbao are Basque. In some villages of Spanish Navarra Prince Louis-Lucien Bonaparte has observed that the men speak Spanish together; with the women they speak Basque, as do the women with each other. This ancient language, then, is manifestly disappearing, though very slowly, and besides it is being continually corrupted by the intrusion of foreign words, due to the exigencies of more complex modern life. Its use is strictly prohibited in the Spanish schools—'Euskarism' being a grave fault of which children must not be guilty. It is interesting to notice that in the French provinces it is French and not a patois that is superseding the Basque. By the aid of Prince Louis-Lucien Bonaparte's great Cartes des Sept Provinces Basques, published at London in 1863, it is possible to obtain approximately the number of persons who still speak this remarkable Pyrenese language. The total number in Europe is about 610,000; of these, 65,000 are in the arrondissement of Bayonne, and 60,000 in that of Mauléon, while 150,000 are found in Navarra, 180,000 in Guipuzcoa, 10,000 in Alava, and 145,000 in Biscaya.
Unfortunately the history of Basque is very short, and the few early allusions to it are meagre and uncertain. Beyond the eighteen words of Aimeric Picard's manuscript, discovered in 1881, and the few mentioned en passant by Lucio Maríneo Siculo in his Cosas illustres y excelentes de España (Alcala de Henares, 1539), we have scarce anything until the discourse of Panurge in chap ix. of the second book of Pantagruel. This incomprehensible passage is not found in any of the editions of Rabelais' work anterior to that of Dolet (1541), and differs so much from the Basque of to-day as to be almost unintelligible. The oldest printed book in Basque dates only from 1545. This is the famous Poésies Basques of Dechepare (reprint, 'Edition Cazals,' Bayonne, 1874), a collection of poems, half devout, half amorous, the work of a curé of Lower Navarra. The next in point of age, but by far the most important of all Basque books, is the New Testament, translated by Licarrague, and printed at La Rochelle in 1571 by order of Jeanne d'Albret (reprint of the Gospel of St Mark, with notes, by M. Vinson, Cazals, Bayonne, 1874; and of that of St Matthew, by M. Van Eys, Maisonneuve, Paris, 1877). The next in importance is Axular's Gueroco Guero, in 1643, the most readable perhaps of all Basque books. The first essay at a Basque grammar appeared in 1638, in chap. xvi. of Oihénart's Notitia utriusque Vasconie. But the study of the language really commenced with P. Manuel de Larramendi's Grammar, published in 1729, under the proud title, El imposible vencido: Arte de la lengua Bascongada. The first, however, to detect the true mechanism of the verb was the Abbé Darigol, whose Dissertation critique et apologetique sur la Langue Basque was published at Bayonne about 1827; but the earliest really scientific attempt to expound its conjugation was made by the Abbé Inchanspe in Le Verbe Basque (Bayonne, 1858). The best modern grammars are Prince Louis-Lucien Bonaparte's Le Verbe Basque en tableaux (Lond. 1869); Ribary's Essai sur la Langue Basque (M. Vinson's French translation from the Hungarian; Paris, 1876); W. J. van Eys, Grammaire comparée des Dialectes Basques (Paris, 1879); and the same writer's Outlines of Basque Grammar, in Triübner's series of 'Simplified Grammars' (Lond. 1883). The last two books contain some theories not generally adopted, and their value has been impugned by the criticisms of several scholars, notably Prince Louis-Lucien Bonaparte. Perhaps the best grammar on the whole is the Grammatica de los tres Dialectos literarios del Vascuense, by Don Arturo Campion (Tolosa, Guipuzcoa, 1886). The first attempt at a dictionary was that of P. de Larramendi, Diccionario trilingüe del Castellano, Bascuence y Latin (San-Sebastian,
1745). A later book was Salaberry's Vocabulaire des Mots Basques Bas-navarrais (Bayonne, 1857). The Basque-French dictionary of Van Eys (Paris, 1874) and Aizquibel's Basque-Spanish dictionary (Tolosa, 1884) are the most accessible modern dictionaries. Such are the monuments for the study of this strange language, which, whether or no it was spoken in Paradise, according to Erro, at least baffled the devil to acquire. After seven years' diligent study in the Labourd country, he had only two words, bai, 'yes,' and ez, 'no,' and even these fled from his memory as he crossed the Pont Saint Esprit of Bayonne.
There exists no national Basque literature properly so called. The five or six hundred volumes in the language are translations from the French, the Spanish, or the Latin; and the few original works have been thought and written by persons who have received an education completely French or Castilian. Many of the books are merely translations of such books as the Imitation, the Spiritual Combat of Senpoli, the Devout Life of François de Sales, or collections of devout meditations, hymns, and prayers. Much more interesting than these is the oral literature of the country, though here there is little that is original and spontaneous, even in the songs, children's rounds, riddles, formulas for games, proverbs, and stories. The pastorales, already spoken of, come first in interest; but their claim to originality has been rudely shaken by Mr Webster's startling discovery. But this primitive people preserves its legends with a tenacity that is striking in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Its stories show the strangest intermixture of ancient with totally new ideas. They are still told by the peasants in the long winter nights, at their prolonged wedding or other feasts, or at the gatherings from time to time to strip the husks from the ears of maize. They are still literally believed in, however much they may seem to contradict modern notions of everyday life. They are lege zaharrreko istorriak, 'histories of the ancient law.' They are arranged by Mr Wentworth Webster in his Basque Legends (1877) in the following seven divisions, containing forty-seven stories: (1) Legends of the Tartaro, or Cyclops; (2) of the Heren-Suge, or Seven-headed Serpent; (3) purely Animal Tales, which are neither fables nor allegories; (4) of Basa-Jaun, Basa-Andre, and of the Lamiak, or Fairies; (5) Tales of Witchcraft and Sorcery; (6) Contes des Fées; and (7) Religious Tales and Legends. The collection of M. Julien Vinson, Le Folk-lore du Pays Basque (Paris, 1883), which has a somewhat wider extent than Mr Webster's, is divided into Contes et Récits; Chansons; Formules d'Elimination, Rondes, Cantilènes, Dictons; Devinettes; Proverbes et Dictons; and Pastorales. The stories are thirty-six in number. The Tartaro is a one-eyed Cyclops, closely resembling the monster of Greek mythology. He lives in a cave among his flocks, and is blinded with a red-hot spit by the hero, who escapes by means of the monster's own sheep. It is perfectly possible that the Greek myth may have been borrowed by the colonists in Sicily or the voyagers to Tartessus from some ancient Basque population. The seven-headed serpent recalls the dragon of chaos in Aaccadian mythology which tempted man to sin, and waged war with Merodach. Basa-Jaun, 'the wild man,' is a kind of satyr or wood sprite; his wife, Basa-Andre, 'the wild woman,' is a kind of sorceress or land mermaid. The Lamiak are true fairies. The legends of witchcraft, as Mr Webster points out, are very poor, not because the belief in witches is extinct, but because it is so rife. The stories are told as matters of fact by the narrator in their own words, quite different from the way in which the legends are narrated in the traditional words, like a text learnt by heart. Witchcraft with them has not yet reached the legendary stage. Indeed it is almost as firmly believed in as it can have been at the beginning of the 17th century, when we know from Pierre de Lancre, the good councillor at the Parlement of Bordeaux, that the Labourd was the chosen home of sorcerers. In his four months' inquiry, May to October 1609, he took the depositions of more than five hundred witnesses, and sent to their doom as many as sixty victims, of whom at least five were priests. (The process is detailed in his De l'Inconstance des mauvais Anges et Démons, 1610 and 1613.) Not only the Basque inclination to sorcery, but their tobacco-smoking, their dancing and their swimming, are severely censured by the rigid councillor. One good reason offered for the levity and inconstancy of the people is that they make so much use of the apple, the fruit of transgression, not only eating its fruit but drinking its juice. Many of the Contes des Fées show a close but hitherto unexplained similarity to Keltic legends, as recorded in Campbell's Tales of the West Highlands; while others are obviously derived directly from the French. The Religious Tales are specimens of a literature which in medieval times rivalled in popularity and interest all other kinds of literature put together. 'Their grossness and rudeness,' says Mr Webster, 'to a great extent hide from us their real tenderness and true religious feeling; but they were, doubtless, to those who first heard them, and are still to those who now recite them, fully as instructive, and have quite as beneficial, purifying, and ennobling influence on them as the most polished and refined of the religious tales of the present day have on the young of our own generation.' Beside the invaluable collections of Mr Webster and M. Julien Vinson already referred to, as many as 110 stories have been printed by M. Cerquand in his Légendes et Récits Populaires du Pays Basque (four parts, Pau, 1871-82).
History.—The early history of the Basque race is as yet entirely uncertain, but so far it appears that at no time in history was there any Basque nationality properly so called, nor can we go back with any kind of historical certainty to a time when they were more than a small tribe of rudimentary civilisation, located more or less widely in the valleys of the Western Pyrenees. The medieval historians speak of a mountain population, variously named Cantabres, Vascons, &c., but are unanimous only in the unflattering terms in which they describe them. The pilgrims who crossed the Pyrenees eight or nine centuries ago feared to meet them. In the year 1120 the Bishop of Porto assumed the disguise of a beggar in order to pass safe and sound through the midst of men who were 'murderers, always ready for mischief, cruel and unrestrained,' and who spoke 'an unknown tongue.' It was doubtless they who, three centuries before, had plundered the rear-guard of the Frankish army, and slain the Roland of romance. The French pilgrim, Aimeric Picard, already referred to, speaks of the plundering habits of the mountain people, and of the severe tolls they levied from wayfarers, but testifies that they were good Catholics withal. A formal sentence of excommunication was declared at the third Lateran Council in 1179 against 'the Basques and Navarrese,' who 'practise so many cruelties upon Christians, plundering and ravaging just like pagans . . . without regard to sex or age.' The evidence of the hagiographers is to the same effect: among the many martyrs was St Léon, the first Bishop of Bayonne, killed about the end of the ninth century by 'pirates very cruel and satellites of the devil.' In the pages of Gregory of Tours, Trédégaire, Isidore, and others we find frequent notices of the plundering ravages of the mountaineers, and from time to time of more or less successful expeditions to punish them by the rulers on both sides of the Pyrenees. The waves of Moslem invasion hardly reached the base of their mountains, but hither fled the remnants of the routed Christian armies, and here began the reaction which was to result in the 'reconquest.' The peoples who then inhabited the northern provinces of Spain, and who had remained independent, had at least the hatred of the eastern conquerors in common, and gradually, under the guidance of enterprising leaders, they grouped themselves together, and formed a number of republics or federal states, from which grew the kingdoms of Asturias in the west; of the Sobrarbe, then of Navarra and Aragon, in the east; and the 'lordship' of Biscaya. Alava, nearer the Moors, constituted a Behctria, a word not understood exactly, but at least the government of the province was essentially oligarchic. Guipuzcoa and Labourd do not appear to have been raised to the dignity of distinct states, but merely to have comprised a number of territorial federations designated by the Spanish name of Hernandades ('fraternities'). La Soule and Lower Navarre were dependent upon the kingdom of Navarre and followed its fate; they comprised a number of vassal vicomtés, of which that of Soule had the longest history. The Labourd formed a vicomté under the dukes of Vasconie, afterwards of Aquitaine. Meantime the struggle with the Moors went on with varying issue—the most glorious day was the 16th of July 1212, when the kings of Navarre, Aragon, and Castile together overthrew the Mussulmans in the plain of Las Navas de Tolosa. Trophies of the victory may be still seen in the churches of Pampeluna and Roncavaux, and from that day on the shield of Navarre have figured the famous chains.
The fundamental history of all the Spanish states depends on the part they played in the 'reconquest.' Certain special privileges (Sp. fueros, Fr. fors) became attached to particular districts, dating from the time when these were granted in the face of a dangerous enemy, and later were exacted from the king or count at the settlement of the reconquered lands. All the provinces in the north of Spain had fueros of this nature, which insured to them not merely exemption from particular imposts or burdens, but something like an actual autonomy, consisting chiefly in a more or less absolute exemption from compulsory military service, the right to free-trade, especially in tobacco and salt, the payment of taxes in a lump, and government through provincial juntas and officials born in the country. These juntas, which met every year at fixed times in some central building, or, as in Biscaya, under the famous oak of Guernica, consisted of members elected by the countrymen, and with them sat the corregidor or representative of the king, and the intermediary between the local and the central authority. In the French provinces a syndic corresponded to the junta; a royal bailli, to the corregidor. These provinces did not consider themselves as forming an integral part of France or Spain, but were connected by the personal bond of the sovereign alone, just as the grand-duchy of Luxemburg is to the kingdom of the Netherlands at the present day. Thus the States of Lower Navarre refused in 1649 to send deputies to the States-general of France; and in 1789, when the unity of France and its division into departments had been decreed, the representatives of that little 'kingdom' withdrew from the National Assembly. The Spanish provinces long watched with the most jealous care any encroachment of the crown upon their fueros. It was only in 1812, at the time of the Napoleonic usurpation, that Navarra for the first time sent representatives to the general cortes of the kingdom—to the famous Cortes of Cadiz. Biscaya was annexed to Spain by a treaty in 1356; the hermandades of Guipuzcoa finally united themselves with Castile in 1200; while Alava, long under a particular fraternity of nobles with an elective over-lord, finally yielded its rights by formal treaty to the king of Castile in 1332. In virtue of these conventions the kings of Navarra, and later, for the three other Basque provinces the kings of Spain, on their accession to the throne, swore solemnly to maintain the fueros of the provinces. In Biscaya this ceremony took place under the oak of Guernica. During the insurrection of 1873-76, Don Carlos the younger revived the ancient ceremony. It was thus celebrated for the last time, for the Spanish government in 1876 suppressed the privileges of Alava, Guipuzcoa, and Biscaya, just as it had those of Navarra in 1839, after the first Carlist insurrection.
The origin of the Basques is one of the most vexed questions of ethnology and philology alike. The controversy was first turned into a totally new direction by the publication at Berlin, in 1821, of W. von Humboldt's famous Prüfung der Untersuchungen über die Urbewohner Hispaniens vermittelst der Waskischen Sprache. (See especially M. A. Marrast's French translation, 1866, with its valuable introduction, containing a summary of the progress of the Basque question since Humboldt's time.) The great German savant's argument was that the Iberians were a people spread over Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, the Spanish Peninsula, Southern France, and the British Isles, and that the modern Basques are the remnant of this race elsewhere expelled or absorbed. The main evidence offered was an attempted explanation of a large number of Spanish and other place-names by the known significations and forms of Basque words. This bold hypothesis long found enthusiastic support, but has since been much modified even by its own supporters. It was assailed by Graslin in Dc l'Ibérie (Paris, 1838), and with especial vigour, along Graslin's lines, by M. J. F. Bladé in his learned Origin des Basques (Paris, 1869), in which it is maintained that Iberia was never more than a geographical term, that no proper Iberian race ever existed, and that the Basques were always shut in by alien races, their own affinity being as yet absolutely unknown. W. J. van Eys and M. Vinson are almost equally sceptical, maintaining indeed that we cannot at present say more than that the riddle is as yet entirely unsolved. Meantime, however, other scholars have continued to offer their hypotheses, and indeed competent scholars like Prince Louis-Lucien Bonaparte and M. Luchaire have maintained the value of some of W. von Humboldt's results. Anthropological research has proved the existence of a Neolithic race in Europe, of small stature, with long or oval skulls, and this race has been confidently identified with the Basques and Iberians. Mr Boyd Dawkins, in several previous papers, and further in his interesting and valuable Early Man in Britain (1880), has found the Iberian characteristics in 'the small dark Highlander,' 'the small swarthy Welshman,' and the 'Black Celts to the west of the Shannon.' Mr Webster, in his paper, 'The Basque and the Kelt,' printed in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute (vol. v. 1876), replying to an article by Mr Dawkins in the Fortnightly Review for September 1874, disposes of the identity between the dark Celts and the Basques, by proving that the
Basques are a mixed race, exhibiting a fair as well as a dark variety, and that the former is on the whole the larger half of the present population. In the discussion that succeeded the reading of this paper, Mr Webster was followed by no less eminent a circle of specialists than Prince Louis-Lucien Bonaparte, Professor Sayce, and Mr W. J. van Eys. Professor Sayce pointed out that the Basques, physically and linguistically, are the representatives of a race that preceded the Celts, and were driven by them into the mountain fastnesses of the extreme west, just as the Finns were by other Aryan tribes in the north. Professor Rhys failed to find many points of similarity between Basque and Keltic, of such a kind as would suggest that the Keltic nations had at any time absorbed Basque ones. Beyond this point the question cannot at present be carried, nor need the inquirer allow his mind to be distracted by assertions unfounded by patient proof. In the meantime, however, it must always be remembered that language and race are not convertible terms, and while the Iberians of ancient Spain probably spoke languages allied to the dialects of the Eskuara, so far there is no proof worth anything that all the tribes called Iberian by classical writers shared the heritage of a common speech. A flood of light may yet be poured on this question, whenever the so-called Celtiberian inscriptions and coins—the letras desconocidas—shall be deciphered. But these still await their Champollion. There is as yet no collection containing all these inscriptions, together with the coins: on the latter the chief works are those of Heiss, Boudard, and Sauley in French; and Delgado, Zobel de Zogroniz, and Puyol y Campo in Spanish. There have been many clever theories and attempts at interpretation, but none as yet has gained a recognised authority. But when the day of true interpretation comes, it will mark a great advance in European archaeology, and especially in our knowledge of the Basque question.
Many worthless books on the Basque language and history have been printed and reprinted, even under the shelter of famous names. Besides the works on the people, or their literature and history already named, the following should be read: Mahn, Denkblätter der Waskischen Sprache (1857); Michel, Le Pays Basque, sa Population, sa Langue (1857); Prince L.-L. Bonaparte's La Langue Basque et les Langues Finnoises (1862); J. F. Bladé's Chants héroïques des Basques (1866); Salaberry's Chants populaires du Pays Basque (1870); Cénac-Moncaut, Histoire des Peuples Pyrénéens (3d ed. Paris, 1874); W. J. van Eys in the Revue de Linguistique, (1874); Vinson in Mémoires du Congrès scientifique de France (ii. 1874); Paul Broca in the Revue d'Anthropologie (vol. iv. 1875)—where, however, the linguistic map is of small value; José Manterola's Cancionero Vasco (1877-80); Vinson, Les Basques et le Pays Basque (1882), and his article in the Dictionnaire des Sciences Anthropologiques, and his Bibliographie de la Langue Basque (1891); Bladé, Les Vaseons (1891); Tubino, Les Aborigènes Ibériques; the grammars of Van Eys and Garat; Schuchardt's Baskische Studien, dealing mainly with the verb; Polovsek, Die Basko-Slavische Sprach-einheit (to prove the thesis that the Basque and Slavonic languages belonged originally to one stock; vol. i. 1894); and the old Basque translation of part of the Old Testament (Genesis, and part of Exodus), made by Pierre d'Urte, a Protestant minister of St Jean de Luz (whose unpublished Basque grammar and dictionary are also in Lord Macleod's library), about 1700, and edited with a preface by Llewelyn Thomas in 1894. The foregoing pages are especially indebted to the works of Vinson and Van Eys.