men; but the first defeat dissolved their confederacy; and the rival chiefs returned with increased avidity to the plunder and massacre of their allies and friends. Their perfidy, which excited the unwilling admiration of nations long practised in the arts of deceit, and which was experienced to their cost by the Romans in the war with Jugurtha, was, without doubt, in a measure responsible for the proverbial reputation for duplicity--the “Punica fides”--of Carthage. Originally idolaters, believers in sorcery and divination, and adorers of the Sun and of Fire, their intercourse with their neighbors, considering its irregular and transitory character, had been singularly productive of changes in religious belief. The emissaries of Christianity had, with but indifferent success, disseminated among them the mysteries of their faith; but to the doctrines of the Pentateuch and the Talmud they lent a willing ear, and the tenets of Judaism, although not a little tinctured with the traditions of Pagan mythology, nominally received the assent of the entire Berber nation. The peculiar type of the Hebrew, insensibly diversified elsewhere by the associations of commercial intercourse, and by the influence of soil, climate, and the operation of laws more or less favorable to the fusion of races, had, in the wilds of Northern Africa, found a congenial locality for its preservation. The exiles who had escaped the persecutions of Titus and Hadrian had settled there and prospered. Laying aside their proverbial reserve, they had joined to their hereditary inclination for traffic an unwonted disposition to acquire proselytes; and their opinions had infected, to a greater or less extent, the population of the coast as well as that of the interior, from the Greater Syrtis to the Pillars of Hercules. Their relations and acquaintance extended not only to the extreme Orient, but were sustained with the semi-barbarous courts of Europe; and their sympathies with their brethren of Semitic origin, assisted by the community of ideas, habits, and mode of life of the Berber tribes, contributed, in a degree which cannot be overestimated, to the establishment and preservation of the Western empire of Islam.