her society. The old
orderly and disciplined character of Germans appeared almost lost.
Countless was the number of unfortunates who having lost house and
farm, maintenance and family, wandered homeless through inhospitable
foreign countries; and not less numerous were the troops of reprobates
who had habituated themselves to live by fraud, extortion, and robbery.
Excitement had become a necessity to the whole living race, for thirty
years the vagrant rabble of all Europe had chosen Germany as their
head-quarters.

Thus it happened that after the peace the doings of the fortune
hunters, adventurers, and rogues increased to an extraordinary extent.
A contrast of weakness and roughness is, in the following century, a
special characteristic of the needy, careworn family life, into which
the spirit of the German people had contracted itself. Some particulars
of this wild life will be here related, which will denote the gradual
changes it underwent. For like the German devils, the children of the
devil have also their history, and their race is more ancient than the
Christian faith.

People are hardly aware of the intimate connection between German life
and Roman antiquity. Not only did the traditions of the Roman empire,
Christianity, Roman law, and the Latin language become parts of the
German civilization, but still more extensively were the numerous
little peculiarities of the Roman world preserved in the middle ages.
German agriculture acquired from the Romans the greater part of its
implements, also wheat, barley, and much of the remaining produce. The
most ancient of our finer kinds of fruit are of Roman origin, equally
so our wine, many garden flowers, and almost all our vegetables; also
the oldest woollen fabrics, cotton and silk stuffs, and all the oldest
machines, as for example, watermills, and the first mining and foundry
works; likewise innumerable other things, even to the oldest forms of
our dress, house utensils, chairs, tables, cupboards, and even the
panels of our folding doors. And if it were possible to measure how
much in our life is gathered from antiquity, or from primitive German
invention, we should still, after the lapse of fifteen centuries, find
so much that is Roman in our fields, gardens, and houses, on our
bodies, nay, even in our souls, that one may well have a right to
inquire whether our primeval ancestors were more under the protection
of Father Jove or of the wild Woden.

Thus amongst