eing, most affectionate, susceptible, even sentimental and
superstitious; fond of gambling, brute excitement, childish amusements in
the intervals of enormous exertion; quarrelsome among themselves, as boys
are, and with a spirit of wild independence which seems to be strength;
but which, till it be disciplined into loyal obedience and
self-sacrifice, is mere weakness; and beneath all a deep practical
shrewdness, an indomitable perseverance, when once roused by need. Such
a spirit as we see to this day in the English sailor--that is the nearest
analogue I can find now. One gets hints here and there of what manner of
men they were, from the evil day, when, one hundred and two years before
Christ, the Kempers and Teutons, ranging over the Alps toward Italy,
300,000 armed men and 15,000 mailed knights with broad sword and lances,
and in their helmets the same bulls'-horns, wings, and feathers, which
one sees now in the crests of German princes, stumbled upon Marius and
his Romans, and were destroyed utterly, first the men, then the women,
who like true women as they were, rather than give up their honour to the
Romans, hung themselves on the horns of the waggon-oxen, and were
trampled to death beneath their feet; and then the very dogs, who fought
on when men and women were all slain--from that fatal day, down to the
glorious one, when, five hundred years after, Alaric stood beneath the
walls of Rome, and to their despairing boast of the Roman numbers,
answered, 'Come out to us then, the thicker the hay, the easier
mowed,'--for five hundred years, I say, the hints of their character are
all those of a boy-nature.

They were cruel at times: but so are boys--much more cruel than grown
men, I hardly know why--perhaps because they have not felt suffering so
much themselves, and know not how hard it is to bear. There were
varieties of character among them. The Franks were always false, vain,
capricious, selfish, taking part with the Romans whenever their interest
or vanity was at stake--the worst of all Teutons, though by no means the
weakest--and a miserable business they made of it in France, for some
five hundred years. The Goths, Salvian says, were the most ignavi of all
of them; great lazy lourdans; apt to be cruel, too, the Visigoths at
least, as their Spanish descendants proved to the horror of the world:
but men of honour withal, as those old Spaniards were. The Saxons were
famed for cruelty--I know not why, for ou