ves, who were, in general, of a more lofty stature than the people
of the South, gave them a kind of strength better adapted to violent
exertions than to patient labor, and inspired them with constitutional
bravery, which is the result of nerves and spirits. The severity of
a winter campaign, that chilled the courage of the Roman troops, was
scarcely felt by these hardy children of the North, who, in their turn,
were unable to resist the summer heats, and dissolved away in languor
and sickness under the beams of an Italian sun.

Chapter IX: State Of Germany Until The Barbarians.--Part II.

There is not any where upon the globe a large tract of country, which we
have discovered destitute of inhabitants, or whose first population can
be fixed with any degree of historical certainty. And yet, as the most
philosophic minds can seldom refrain from investigating the infancy
of great nations, our curiosity consumes itself in toilsome and
disappointed efforts. When Tacitus considered the purity of the German
blood, and the forbidding aspect of the country, he was disposed to
pronounce those barbarians Indigen, or natives of the soil. We may
allow with safety, and perhaps with truth, that ancient Germany was
not originally peopled by any foreign colonies already formed into a
political society; but that the name and nation received their existence
from the gradual union of some wandering savages of the Hercynian woods.
To assert those savages to have been the spontaneous production of
the earth which they inhabited would be a rash inference, condemned by
religion, and unwarranted by reason.

Such rational doubt is but ill suited with the genius of popular vanity.
Among the nations who have adopted the Mosaic history of the world, the
ark of Noah has been of the same use, as was formerly to the Greeks and
Romans the siege of Troy. On a narrow basis of acknowledged truth, an
immense but rude superstructure of fable has been erected; and the wild
Irishman, as well as the wild Tartar, could point out the individual son
of Japhet, from whose loins his ancestors were lineally descended. The
last century abounded with antiquarians of profound learning and easy
faith, who, by the dim light of legends and traditions, of conjectures
and etymologies, conducted the great grandchildren of Noah from the
Tower of Babel to the extremities of the globe. Of these judicious
critics, one of the most entertaining was Oaus Rudbeck, professor in