CHAPTER XIII.
BASQUE LANGUAGE--DIALECTS--WORDS--POETRY--SONGS--THE DESERTER--CHARACTER--DRAMA--TOWNS.
THE Basque country,--in which the ancient town of Bayonne, or Lapurdum, holds a principal place,--is unequally divided between France and Spain.
The one part is composed of La Soule, Basse Navarre, and Labourd, and extends over a surface of about a hundred and forty square leagues; the other portion comprises Haute Navarre, Alava, Guipuscoa, and Biscay, and contains about nine hundred and sixty square leagues: so that the whole country in which the Basque language is spoken, enclosed between the Adour, Bearn, the river Arragon, the Ebro, and the ocean, contains not less than eleven hundred square leagues.

Part of this extent is barren, rude, and wooded, and is said to resemble the ancient state of Gaul, as described by historians.

Though immense tracts of wood have been cleared away, there is still more in this region than in any other of the Pyrenees; there are three great forests; one of Aldudes, in the valley of Balgorry, where exist the only copper-mines in France; the forest of Irati, near Roncevaux; and that of St.Engrace, which joins the woods of Itseaux.
The habits, manners, and language, of this people have engaged the attention of the curious for a series of years; and the speculations and, surmises to which they have given rise are without end.

Although it is generally thought that the Basques are descendants of the ancient Iberians, some learned writers contend that the singular language which they speak, and which has no resemblance to that of any of the nations which surround them, approaches very near the Celtic.
Whether they are _Vascons_ or _Cantabrians_, they are called, in their own tongues, _Escualdunac_, and their language _Escuara_.

Seventy-two towns, bourgs, and villages, are named, by Du Mege, as appropriated to the people of this denomination,--that is, from the mouth of the Adour to the banks of the Soison and the mountains south of the Pays de Soule.
He remarks that no historian of antiquity has made mention of this people, or their language, under the name they at present bear; and it was never advanced till the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries, that the inhabitants of Alava, Guipuscoa, and Spanish and French Navarre had preserved the ancient language of the Iberians, and that they were the representatives of that nation; never having been conquered by any foreign invaders, and never having mixed their blood.
Du Mege observes, on these pretensions: "History, studied at its purest sources, and from its most authentic documents, proves that, in the most distant times, several nations,--amongst whom, doubtless, should be included those who first inhabited the coasts of Africa,--came and established themselves in Spain.