whose flocks and
herds followed, or rather guided, the motions of their roving camps;
to whose inroads no country was remote or impervious, and who were
practised in flight, though incapable of fear. The nation was divided
into two powerful and hostile tribes, who pursued each other with
fraternal hatred. They eagerly disputed the friendship, or rather the
gifts, of the emperor; and the distinctions which nature had fixed
between the faithful dog and the rapacious wolf was applied by an
ambassador who received only verbal instructions from the mouth of his
illiterate prince. [12] The Bulgarians, of whatsoever species, were
equally attracted by Roman wealth: they assumed a vague dominion over
the Sclavonian name, and their rapid marches could only be stopped by
the Baltic Sea, or the extreme cold and poverty of the north. But the
same race of Sclavonians appears to have maintained, in every age, the
possession of the same countries. Their numerous tribes, however distant
or adverse, used one common language, (it was harsh and irregular,) and
where known by the resemblance of their form, which deviated from the
swarthy Tartar, and approached without attaining the lofty stature and
fair complexion of the German. Four thousand six hundred villages [13]
were scattered over the provinces of Russia and Poland, and their huts
were hastily built of rough timber, in a country deficient both in stone
and iron. Erected, or rather concealed, in the depth of forests, on the
banks of rivers, or the edges of morasses, we may not perhaps, without
flattery, compare them to the architecture of the beaver; which they
resembled in a double issue, to the land and water, for the escape of
the savage inhabitant, an animal less cleanly, less diligent, and less
social, than that marvellous quadruped. The fertility of the soil,
rather than the labor of the natives, supplied the rustic plenty of the
Sclavonians. Their sheep and horned cattle were large and numerous, and
the fields which they sowed with millet or panic [14] afforded, in place
of bread, a coarse and less nutritive food. The incessant rapine of
their neighbors compelled them to bury this treasure in the earth; but
on the appearance of a stranger, it was freely imparted by a people,
whose unfavorable character is qualified by the epithets of chaste,
patient, and hospitable. As their supreme god, they adored an invisible
master of the thunder. The rivers and the nymphs obtained their
su