Henceforth Father Rhine conceived a strong affection for his former adversaries. When he saw that the German bank had adopted the customs and the religion of the conquerors as fully as the Celtic bank, he abandoned completely his restrictive policy and did his best to help everybody across. Thus Jupiter was no sooner installed in Germany, than he summoned his Corybantes; Bacchus his Bacchantes and his Maenads, Diana {110}her hunting nymphs, Venus her whole court of lascivious priestesses; the Dryads and the Hamadryads, the Naiads and the Tritons, the Fauns and the S il vans, all came one by one. It was a perfect invasion. [Illustration: 130] Germany, grave and solemn as she was, felt not a little troubled by this wholesale irruption of frivolous {111}and ill-mannered deities, who so little agreed with her austere habits. The young, it is true, were more easily Romanized and readily caught at this poetical personification of all the forces of Nature; but the old, the chieftains, and above all the Druids, backed by a nearly unanimous people, asked each other what could be the meaning of this sudden enthusiasm for new gods, this half mad devotion to celestial clowns? No one, however, dared to raise a hand; the Teutons had lost their former energy, they were enfeebled, unnerved and exhausted by their long but useless resistance. Hence, like true cowards, they appeared in the pagan temples, in order to conciliate the good-will of the conquerors, and then, to pacify their consciences, they hastened to some dark forest and there with anxious eyes and disturbed minds, they offered in fear and trembling their fervent worship to the sacred oak. The Roman gods were soon to encounter far more formidable adversaries elsewhere. Far beyond Germany, as we find it described and limited by geographers, there lived a host of nations, scattered over a vast territory, and extending as far East as the shores of the Caspian Sea. The Romans had never penetrated far into these unknown depths, which sent forth incessantly new armies of soldiers whom they classed indiscriminately {112}under the vague and collective name of Hyperboreans. Such were the Huns, the Scythians, the Goths, the Slaves (Poles, Danes, Swedes, Russians, and Norwegians), all of them robbers and pirates. Some, under the name of Cimbrians, had joined the Teutons t and with them invaded Gaul and even Italy, till they encountered the armies of Marius; others, were about to cross the Pyrenees and to fall upon Spain. Among them all, the Scandinavians were by far the most powerful, intrepid soldiers and fearless sailors, who were soon to darken the waters of the Rhine with their countless vessels, and to make Charlemagne shed tears as he thought of the days to come.