have no bearing whatever on Roman society, nay, which are of so little interest to the general reader that I doubt whether many Romans would have taken the trouble to read them. The facts which came to the knowledge of Tacitus are so loosely strung together that his book looks more like a collection of memoranda than the compact and pointed pamphlet of a political satirist. We need only read the letters of Voltaire on England, or Montalembert's pamphlet, _De l'Angleterre_, in order to perceive the difference between a political satire and an historical memoir. No doubt a man of the temper of Tacitus would naturally dwell with satisfaction on the bright side of the German character, and, while holding before the eyes of his own nation the picture of a brave and simple, religious and independent race, might naturally think of what Rome once had been, and was no longer. But there is no more sarcasm or satire in his work than is inseparable from a straightforward statement of facts when addressed to ears no longer accustomed to the sound of unvarnished truth. So little did M. Guizot perceive the unique character of the _Germania_ of Tacitus as an historical document of the earliest stage of society, that he amused himself with collecting from various books of travel a number of facts observed among the very lowest races in America and Africa, which, as he thinks, form an exact parallel to the statements of Tacitus with regard to the good and bad qualities of the Germans. His parallel columns, which occupy nearly ten pages, are certainly amusing, but they prove nothing, least of all that there was no difference between the healthy sons of Germany and the tattooed cannibals of New Zealand. If they prove anything, it is that there is one kind of barbarism through which every nation has to pass, the childhood and wild youth of a race, to be followed by the mature vigor of a nation's manhood, and that there is another kind of barbarism which leads to nothing, but ends in mere brutality, shrinking from contact with higher civilisation and succumbing when it attempts to imitate with monkeyish delight the virtues and vices of a more advanced society. Why is it that the fresh breezes of European civilisation proved fatal to the consumptive barbarism of the wretched inhabitants of Australia, while the strong constitution of the Germans of Tacitus resisted even the poisonous vapors of Roman life? When the results are so different, surely there must be a difference in the antecedents, and though M. Guizot is successful in showing that in some respects the ancient Germans did the same things and said the same things as Ojibways and Papuans, he forgets in drawing his conclusion the old proverb, _Si duo dicunt idem, non est idem_.