times extremely populous, and to supply men for slaughters
scarcely credible, if other well-known and well-attested ones had not
given them a color. The first settling of the Jews here was attended by
an almost entire extirpation of all the former inhabitants. Their own
civil wars, and those with their petty neighbors, consumed vast
multitudes almost every year for several centuries; and the irruptions
of the kings of Babylon and Assyria made immense ravages. Yet we have
their history but partially, in an indistinct, confused manner; so that
I shall only throw the strong point of light upon that part which
coincides with Roman history, and of that part only on the point of time
when they received the great and final stroke which made them, no more a
nation; a stroke which is allowed to have cut off little less than two
millions of that people. I say nothing of the loppings made from that
stock whilst it stood; nor from the suckers that grew out of the old
root ever since. But if, in this inconsiderable part of the globe, such
a carnage has been made in two or three short reigns, and that this
great carnage, great as it is, makes but a minute part of what the
histories of that people inform us they suffered; what shall we judge of
countries more extended, and which have waged wars by far more
considerable?

Instances of this sort compose the uniform of history. But there have
been periods when no less than universal destruction to the race of
mankind seems to have been threatened. Such was that when the Goths, the
Vandals, and the Huns, poured into Gaul, Italy, Spain, Greece, and
Africa, carrying destruction before them as they advanced, and leaving
horrid deserts every way behind them. _Vastum ubique silentium, secreti
colles; fumantia procul tecta; nemo exploratoribus obvius_, is what
Tacitus calls _facies victoriae_. It is always so; but was here
emphatically so. From the north proceeded the swarms of Goths, Vandals,
Huns, Ostrogoths, who ran towards the south, into Africa itself, which
suffered as all to the north had done. About this time, another torrent
of barbarians, animated by the same fury, and encouraged by the same
success, poured out of the south, and ravaged all to the northeast and
west, to the remotest parts of Persia on one hand, and to the banks of
the Loire or farther on the other; destroying all the proud and curious
monuments of human art, that not even the memory might seem to survive
of the forme