abused the confidence, and deceived the inexperienced
youth, of his sons.

If the geographical accuracy of Ammianus had been fortunately bestowed
on the British exploits of Theodosius, we should have traced, with eager
curiosity, the distinct and domestic footsteps of his march. But the
tedious enumeration of the unknown and uninteresting tribes of Africa
may be reduced to the general remark, that they were all of the swarthy
race of the Moors; that they inhabited the back settlements of the
Mauritanian and Numidian province, the country, as they have since been
termed by the Arabs, of dates and of locusts; and that, as the Roman
power declined in Africa, the boundary of civilized manners and
cultivated land was insensibly contracted. Beyond the utmost limits of
the Moors, the vast and inhospitable desert of the South extends above
a thousand miles to the banks of the Niger. The ancients, who had a very
faint and imperfect knowledge of the great peninsula of Africa, were
sometimes tempted to believe, that the torrid zone must ever remain
destitute of inhabitants; and they sometimes amused their fancy by
filling the vacant space with headless men, or rather monsters; with
horned and cloven-footed satyrs; with fabulous centaurs; and with human
pygmies, who waged a bold and doubtful warfare against the cranes.
Carthage would have trembled at the strange intelligence that the
countries on either side of the equator were filled with innumerable
nations, who differed only in their color from the ordinary appearance
of the human species: and the subjects of the Roman empire might have
anxiously expected, that the swarms of Barbarians, which issued from
the North, would soon be encountered from the South by new swarms of
Barbarians, equally fierce and equally formidable. These gloomy terrors
would indeed have been dispelled by a more intimate acquaintance with
the character of their African enemies. The inaction of the negroes
does not seem to be the effect either of their virtue or of their
pusillanimity. They indulge, like the rest of mankind, their passions
and appetites; and the adjacent tribes are engaged in frequent acts of
hostility. But their rude ignorance has never invented any effectual
weapons of defence, or of destruction; they appear incapable of
forming any extensive plans of government, or conquest; and the obvious
inferiority of their mental faculties has been discovered and abused by
the nations of the temper