CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS ORATORY. 



stream until you have made compensation to those whom you have reduced to 

 misery. If you refuse, the weight of my sword shall be felt by you, by your 

 wives, and by your children, to avenge the wrong done to the King my 

 master." This proud utterance is full of simplicity, but it no way resembles 

 the allocutions addressed by the generals of Greece and of Rome to their 

 soldiers allocutions of real eloquence, in which was united to beauty of 

 diction the power of moving and carrying away popular feeling. 



In certain circumstances, however, the Gauls must have employed the 



Fig. 392. St. Jerome and two Cardinals. Miniature from the "Petit Traite de la Vanite drs 

 Choses Mondaines." Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century (No. 30, Sc. and A.). In th 

 Arsenal Library, Paris. 



gift of speaking with success, but we possess no written record of their civil 

 oratory. This oratory they undoubtedly employed in judicial pleadings, even 

 at the time when the Germans and the Franks were established in Gaul. The 

 Franks, who did not hesitate to assume the language, and even to imitate the 

 customs, of the peoples whom they had subjected, found the Gallo-Roman bar 

 in regular practice in the sixth century, and far from fettering an institution 

 which, as has been ingeniously suggested by a modern historian, appeared to 



