ing upon their
heads or round their arms, and depicting upon their naked bodies,
fantastic ornaments, which gave them a wild appearance. An unbridled
passion for wine and strong liquors was general amongst them: the traders
of Italy, and especially of Marseilles, brought supplies into every part
of Gaul; from interval to interval there were magazines established,
whither the Gauls flocked to sell for a flask of wine their furs, their
grain, their cattle, their slaves. "It was easy," says an ancient
historian, "to get the Ganymede for the liquor." Such are the essential
characteristics of barbaric life, as they have been and as they still are
at several points of our globe, amongst people of the same grade in the
scale of civilization. They existed in nearly an equal degree amongst
the different races of ancient Gaul, whose resemblance was rendered much
stronger thereby than their diversity in other respects by some of their
customs, traditions, or ideas.

In their case, too, there is no sign of those permanent demarcations,
those rooted antipathies, and that impossibility of unity which are
observable amongst peoples whose original moral condition is really very
different. In Asia, Africa, and America, the English, the Dutch, the
Spanish, and the French have been and are still in frequent contact with
the natives of the country--Hindoos, Malays, Negroes, and Indians; and,
in spite of this contact, the races have remained widely separated one
from another. In ancient Gaul not only did Gauls, Kymrians, and Iberians
live frequently in alliance and almost intimacy, but they actually
commingled and cohabited without scruple on the same territory. And so
we find in the midst of the Iberians, towards the mouth of the Garonne, a
Gallic tribe, the Viviscan Biturigians, come from the neighborhood of
Bourges, where the bulk of the nation was settled: they had been driven
thither by one of the first invasions of the Kymrians, and peaceably
taken root there; Burdigaia, afterwards Bordeaux, was the chief
settlement of this tribe, and even then a trading-place between the
Mediterranean and the ocean. A little farther on, towards the south, a
Kymrian tribe, the Bolans, lived isolated from its race, in the
waste-lands of the Iberians, extracting the resin from the pines which
grew in that territory. To the south-west, in the country situated
between the Garonne, the eastern Pyrenees, the Cevennes, and the Rhone,
two great tribe