ls us, surpassed all the tribes on the
Rhine in bravery. This fierce nation paid its tribute in soldiers, and
was reserved by its conquerors, like arrow and sword, only for battle.
The Romans themselves acknowledged the Batavian horsemen to be their
best cavalry. Like the Swiss at this day, they formed for a long time
the body-guard of the Roman Emperor; their wild courage terrified the
Dacians, as they saw them, in full armor, swimming across the Danube.
The Batavi accompanied Agricola in his expedition against Britain, and
helped him to conquer that island. The Frieses were, of all, the last
subdued, and the first to regain their liberty. The morasses among
which they dwelt attracted the conquerors later, and enhanced the price
of conquest. The Roman Drusus, who made war in these regions, had a
canal cut from the Rhine into the Flevo, the present Zuyder Zee, through
which the Roman fleet penetrated into the North Sea, and from thence,
entering the mouths of the Ems and the Weser, found an easy passage into
the interior of Germany.

Through four centuries we find Batavian troops in the Roman armies, but
after the time of Honorius their name disappears from history.
Presently we discover their island overrun by the Franks, who again lost
themselves in the adjoining country of Belgium. The Frieses threw off
the yoke of their distant and powerless rulers, and again appearad as a
free, and even a conquering people, who governed themselves by their own
customs and a remnant of Roman laws, and extended their limits beyond
the left bank of the Rhine. Of all the provinces of the Netherlands,
Friesland especially had suffered the least from the irruptions of
strange tribes and foreign customs, and for centuries retained traces of
its original institutions, of its national spirit and manners, which
have not, even at the present day, entirely disappeared.

The epoch of the immigration of nations destroyed the original form of
most of these tribes; other mixed races arose in their place, with other
constitutions. In the general irruption the towns and encampments of
the Romans disappeared, and with them the memorials of their wise
government, which they had employed the natives to execute. The
neglected dikes once more yielded to the violence of the streams and to
the encroachments of the ocean. Those wonders of labor, and creations
of human skill, the canals, dried up, the rivers changed their course,
the continent and the sea c