196 AGBICULTUHE. 



We are unwilling to close this long article without a, 

 word or two more on some conclusions respecting our Gallic 

 and British ancestors, at which we have arrived from a pe- 

 rusal of the agricultural writers of Rome. When her pro- 

 fessed historians passed the boundaries of Italy, they oc- 

 cupied themselves little with any matters which had not 

 immediate bearing on the career of Roman conquest. The 

 nations to their north and west were unknown to history, 

 were classed under the general appellation of barbarians, 

 and nothing respecting them appeared worthy to be re- 

 corded except the degree of resistance which they were 

 able to offer to the Roman arms. Of what Mr. Hoskyns 

 appropriately calls their " inner life " we learn nothing. 

 Even when Tacitus writes a treatise " On the Manners of 

 the Germans," he gives an account of them which nothing 

 but our respect for a great name prevents our calling 

 childish and absurd. The people he professed to describe 

 were a great nation, who repeatedly foiled the Roman 

 generals, and destroyed their armies, and who, though 

 harassed on their frontiers, were in fact never conquered. 

 In epigrammatic and antithetical sentences he sets before 

 us a state of orderly but very democratic freedom. Men 

 inspired by romantic virtue, and restrained by puritanical 

 morality ; women chaste, constant, and devoted, as became 

 the wives and daughters of such heroes. If the nation had 

 a fault, it was a somewhat too great proneness to convivial 

 hospitality. That their dwellings were covered neither 

 with tile nor thatch, that the men wore a robe pinned on 

 with a thorn, and that the semi-nudity of the females was 

 only redeemed from indecency by their perfect innocence, 

 is all that we learn about their lodging and clothing. A 

 statement that they made an intoxicating liquor from grain ; 

 and three sentences, which are rather negative than de- 

 scriptive, dispatch the whole subject of their agriculture. 

 The conclusion of the treatise declines, with a prudent re- 

 serve, to pass any opinion on the apparently prevalent 

 report that the remoter tribes combined the visages of men 



