mall indeed.

Upon the Celts came the Greeks and the Romans. The former took no such
hold of the country as the latter did; but yet there seems to be some
reason for Mr. Van Laun's summary of the influence upon Gaul, (not yet
France) of the two great nations of antiquity when he says: "Greece,
the commercial nation, had charmed and penetrated her hosts by her
poetry, her rhetoric, her arts; Rome, the military nation, remodelled
her victims by her laws, her administration, her moral vigor." This is
somewhat loosely expressed for a work of such literary pretensions as
those of the book before us; but it suggests the truth. There was,
however, in the end, to use a popular phrase, "no comparison" between
the influence of the Greeks and that of the Romans upon Gaul. It was in
letters as in society and in politics; the intellectual existence of
Gaul, as well as her physical existence, was to be inextricably
interwoven with that of her Roman conquerors. Gaul became Romanized;
the language of the country, whatever it had been, was driven out, and
Latin took its place. The people of the country became one of what are
now known as the Latin races, chiefly because of their languages.
French is little more than Latin first debased and then by culture
reformed into a language having a character and laws of its own. The
words which form the bulk of the French language may be traced, have
been traced, down step by step from the original Latin forms; and it is
found that changes from ancient Latin to modern French took place
according to certain phonetic laws so absolute that, given a Latin
word, philologists can tell surely under what form it must appear in
French.

After the Romans came the Teutonic invaders; and of these the Franks so
imposed themselves upon the country that they gave it their name, and
Gaul became France. Charlemagne was neither Celtic nor Latin, but
simply Karl the Great, a Teutonic monarch under whose sceptre all the
Franks were united. The predominance of the Franks in Gaul for many
generations had a modifying influence upon the people. The Celtic Gaul
was a lively, spirited, vain, bold, but not a very steadily courageous
man. The Teutonic was a quieter, steadier, more reserved, and more
thoughtful man. He was a bigger man, too, and like big men, he took
things more quietly; he had the steady courage which the dashing and
gaily caparisoned Celt somewhat lacked. And yet it is remarkable that
in the end the Celt