In the time of Caesar, it would be erroneous to speak of the Gauls as a really barbarous nation. It is true that everything connected with the arts, such as their coins and idols, is detestable, but in other things they seem to have reached the same stage of civilization at which our ancestors were in the time of the Othos. The population was very large; but the Cimbrian war made fearful havoc, and the misery resulting from it surpasses all our conceptions. In the time of Caesar, they had only partially recovered from it, and yet they present the appearance of a pretty strong population: their towns were considerable, the country was well cultivated; and all we hear of them suggests to us the idea of a rude rather than a barbarous state of things. The Romans became acquainted with water-mills and saw-mills in Gaul, nor were manufactures wanting there; but the Gauls were prevented by their treaties with the Romans from cultivating vines and olives. Their style of architecture is very common among ourselves, but was utterly unknown among the Greeks and Romans: the buildings consisted of wooden frames and wicker work, and even the walls of their towns were joined by means of beams, a method which was very surprising to the Romans. This is the reason why there are so very few remains of the ante-Roman period. The Gauls very quickly adopted the civilisation of the Romans, who established themselves in the southern province about the year of the city 630, and thence extended their dominion towards Lyons. In Pliny’s time that country was so completely changed, that he declares it to be not a province but a true Italy. The rest of Gaul also soon became Romanised, though the Latin language did not spread there with equal facility; and we may probably assume that at the time of the Frankish conquest the Celtic language had not yet become extinct. Still, however, a dialect of Latin, different in character from our Latin, was diffused all over Gaul; and this is the root of the Romance or Provençal language. The study of Roman literature spread more and more; Gaul always had men of good abilities, and thus a peculiar literature was formed, of which Rheims, then called _Durocortorum_, was the seat and centre. I think I have discovered a new proof of an ancient rustic form of this name, according to which it was pronounced _Durocortoro_; I allude to a fragment from Fronto in Consentius:[72] _et illae vestrae Athenae Durocortoro_, where the corrupt termination is probably intentional, Fronto sneering at Consentius, because the inhabitants of the country did not correctly pronounce the name of their own university town.