Among the countless hordes of barbarians who in the third and fourth centuries overran the provinces of the Roman Empire, and insulted the majesty of the sovereigns of the East, none were so pre-eminently distinguished for valor, loyalty, generosity, and chastity as the Goths. From the third century, when the luxurious tastes of Rome impelled adventurous traders to penetrate to the shores of the Baltic in search of amber, to the establishment of an independent monarchy in Italy by Theodoric in the fifth, their name was familiar to Europe--now suggestive of a bulwark of the tottering throne of Byzantium, and again, as a synonym of murder, pillage, and devastation. Of towering stature and fierce aspect, their forms were cast in the gigantic proportions which pagan mythology loved to attribute to its gods and heroes. Their habitations were situated in the depths of gloomy forests, on the banks of deep and rapid streams, or were surrounded by marshes, over whose treacherous and yielding surface a winding pathway usually led to a remote and well defended stronghold. Like all people whose intellectual development had scarcely begun, they believed implicitly in omens, auguries, signs, and dreams; their religious ideas were vague and ill defined; and neither history nor tradition has preserved for us the appellation or attributes of a single Gothic divinity. At their banquets, defiled by drunken orgies, and not infrequently the scenes of violence and even homicide, were celebrated, in uncouth ballads, the exploits of the famous warriors of the nation. Their very name, indicative of the superiority which their prowess never failed to exact, signified The Nobly Born. Without literature, save a fragmentary translation of the Bible, without government, save the dominion of some chieftain who, covetous of renown, temporarily enjoyed the precarious title of sovereign, eager for change, the most reckless of gamesters, the most pitiless of conquerors, destruction was with them a passion, and war an amusement. In common with other barbarians, with whom the ignorance and fears of the age have confounded them, they claimed and exercised, to the utmost, the privileges of individual dignity and personal freedom. An arbitrary classification, dependent upon a fortuitous geographical distribution, had divided this people into Ostrogoths and Visigoths, according to their relative location upon the eastern and western banks of the river Borysthenes. The pressure from the north, which had dispersed the tribes of the forests of Germany and Pannonia over the European provinces of the Roman Empire, had induced the Visigoths, by necessity or choice, to seek a home in Gaul, which country they occupied in common with the Vandals, the Suevi, the Alani, and other more obscure, but not less formidable, barbarians; and scarcely had the division of the empire between Arcadius and Honorius been effected in the first years of the fifth century, when the inhabitants of Spain, either