inguish the original principles of our present laws and
manners. In their primitive state of simplicity and independence, the
Germans were surveyed by the discerning eye, and delineated by the
masterly pencil, of Tacitus, the first of historians who applied the
science of philosophy to the study of facts. The expressive conciseness
of his descriptions has served to exercise the diligence of innumerable
antiquarians, and to excite the genius and penetration of the
philosophic historians of our own times. The subject, however various
and important, has already been so frequently, so ably, and so
successfully discussed, that it is now grown familiar to the reader,
and difficult to the writer. We shall therefore content ourselves
with observing, and indeed with repeating, some of the most important
circumstances of climate, of manners, and of institutions, which
rendered the wild barbarians of Germany such formidable enemies to the
Roman power.

Ancient Germany, excluding from its independent limits the province
westward of the Rhine, which had submitted to the Roman yoke, extended
itself over a third part of Europe. Almost the whole of modern Germany,
Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Livonia, Prussia, and the greater part
of Poland, were peopled by the various tribes of one great nation, whose
complexion, manners, and language denoted a common origin, and preserved
a striking resemblance. On the west, ancient Germany was divided by
the Rhine from the Gallic, and on the south, by the Danube, from the
Illyrian, provinces of the empire. A ridge of hills, rising from the
Danube, and called the Carpathian Mountains, covered Germany on the
side of Dacia or Hungary. The eastern frontier was faintly marked by the
mutual fears of the Germans and the Sarmatians, and was often confounded
by the mixture of warring and confederating tribes of the two nations.
In the remote darkness of the north, the ancients imperfectly descried
a frozen ocean that lay beyond the Baltic Sea, and beyond the Peninsula,
or islands of Scandinavia.

Some ingenious writers have suspected that Europe was much colder
formerly than it is at present; and the most ancient descriptions of the
climate of Germany tend exceedingly to confirm their theory. The general
complaints of intense frost and eternal winter, are perhaps little to be
regarded, since we have no method of reducing to the accurate standard
of the thermometer, the feelings, or the expressions, of