The trial of what those ages contained, is not even fairly made, when men of genius and distinguished abilities, with the accomplishments of a learned and a polished age, collect the materials they have found, and, with the greatest success, connect the story of illiterate ages with transactions of a later date. It is difficult even for them, under the names which are applied in a new state of society, to convey a just apprehension of what mankind were, in situations so different, and in times so remote from their own. In deriving from historians of this character the instruction which their writings are fit to bestow, we are frequently to forget the general terms that are employed, in order to collect the real manners of any age from the minute circumstances that are occasionally presented. The titles of _Royal_ and _Noble_ were applicable to the families of Tarquin, Collatinus, and Cincinnatus; but Lucretia was employed in domestic industry with her maids, and Cincinnatus followed the plough. The dignities, and even the offices, of civil society, were known many ages ago, in Europe, by their present appellations; but we find in the history of England, that a king and his court being assembled to solemnize a festival, an outlaw, who had subsisted by robbery, came to share in the feast. The king himself arose to force this unworthy guest from the company; a scuffle ensued between them; and the king was killed. [Footnote: Hume's History, chap. 8. p. 278] A chancellor and prime minister, whose magnificence and sumptuous furniture were the subject of admiration and envy, had his apartments covered every day in winter with clean straw and hay, and in summer with green rushes or boughs. Even the sovereign himself, in those ages, was provided with forage for his bed. [Footnote: Hume's History, chap. 8. p.73] These picturesque features, and characteristical strokes of the times, recal the imagination from the supposed distinction of monarch and subject, to that state of rough familiarity in which our ancestors lived, and under which they acted, with a view to objects, and on principles of conduct, which we seldom comprehend, when we are employed to record their transactions, or to study their characters. Thucydides, notwithstanding the prejudice of his country against the name of _Barbarian_, understood that it was in the customs of barbarous nations he was to study the more ancient manners of Greece.