ays.

8. The first thing, then, you have to note of her, is that she is a
pure native _Gaul_. She does not come as a missionary out of Hungary,
or Illyria, or Egypt, or ineffable space; but grows at Nanterre, like
a marguerite in the dew, the first "Reine Blanche" of Gaul.

I have not used this ugly word 'Gaul' before, and we must be quite
sure what it means, at once, though it will cost us a long
parenthesis.

9. During all the years of the rising power of Rome, her people called
everybody a Gaul who lived north of the sources of Tiber. If you are not
content with that general statement, you may read the article "Gallia"
in Smith's dictionary, which consists of seventy-one columns of close
print, containing each as much as three of my pages; and tells you at
the end of it, that "though long, it is not complete." You may however,
gather from it, after an attentive perusal, as much as I have above told
you.

But, as early as the second century after Christ, and much more
distinctly in the time with which we are ourselves concerned--the
fifth--the wild nations opposed to Rome, and partially subdued, or
held at bay by her, had resolved themselves into two distinct masses,
belonging to two distinct _latitudes_. One, _fixed_ in habitation of
the pleasant temperate zone of Europe--England with her western
mountains, the healthy limestone plateaux and granite mounts of
France, the German labyrinths of woody hill and winding thal, from the
Tyrol to the Hartz, and all the vast enclosed basin and branching
valleys of the Carpathians. Think of these four districts, briefly and
clearly, as 'Britain,' 'Gaul,' 'Germany,' and 'Dacia.'

10. North of these rudely but patiently _resident_ races, possessing
fields and orchards, quiet herds, homes of a sort, moralities and
memories not ignoble, dwelt, or rather drifted, and shook, a shattered
chain of gloomier tribes, piratical mainly, and predatory, nomad
essentially; homeless, of necessity, finding no stay nor comfort in
earth, or bitter sky: desperately wandering along the waste sands and
drenched morasses of the flat country stretching from the mouths of
the Rhine to those of the Vistula, and beyond Vistula nobody knows
where, nor needs to know. Waste sands and rootless bogs their portion,
ice-fastened and cloud-shadowed, for many a day of the rigorous year:
shallow pools and oozings and windings of retarded streams, black
decay of neglected woods, scarcely habitable, never lovea