ed,
many of their peculiarities are explained. Falsehood, brutality,
lawlessness, ignorance, and cruelty to the conquered Romans, were their
special sins; while their special, and indeed only virtue, was that
indomitable daring which they transmitted to their descendants for so
many hundred years. The buccaneers of the young world, they were
insensible to all influences save that of superstition. They had become,
under Clovis, orthodox Christians: but their conversion, to judge from
the notorious facts of history, worked little improvement on their
morals. The pages of Gregory of Tours are comparable, for dreary
monotony of horrors, only to those of Johnson's History of the Pyrates.

But, as M. Sismondi well remarks, their very ignorance and brutality made
them the more easily the tools of the Roman clergy: 'Cette haute
veneration pour l'Eglise, et leur severe orthodoxie, d'autant plus facile
a conserver que, ne faisant aucune etude, et ne disputant jamais sur la
foi, ils ne connaissaient pas meme les questions controversees, leur
donnerent dans le clerge de puissants auxiliaires. Les Francs se
montrerent disposes a hair les Ariens, a les combattres, et les
depouiller sans les entendre; les eveques, en retour, ne se montrerent
pas scrupuleux sur le reste des enseignements moraux de la religion: ils
fermerent les yeux sur les violences, le meurtre, le dereglement des
moeurs; ils autoriserent en quelque sorte publiquement la poligamie, et
ils precherent le droit divin des rois et le devoir le l'obeissance pour
les peuples {279}.'

A painful picture of the alliance: but, I fear, too true.

The history of these Franks you must read for yourselves. You will find
it well told in the pages of Sismondi, and in Mr. Perry's excellent book,
'The Franks.' It suffices now to say, that in the days of Luitprand
these Franks, after centuries of confusion and bloodshed, have been
united into one great nation, stretching from the Rhine to the Loire and
the sea, and encroaching continually to the southward and eastward. The
government has long passed out of the hands of their faineant Meerwing
kings into that of the semi-hereditary Majores Domus, or Mayors of the
Palace; and Charles Martel, perhaps the greatest of that race of great
men, has just made himself mayor of Austrasia (the real Teutonic centre
of Frank life and power), Neustria and Burgundy. He has crushed Eudo,
the duke of Romanized Aquitaine, and has finally deliver