People are hardly aware of the intimate connection between German life and Roman antiquity. Not only did the traditions of the Roman empire, Christianity, Roman law, and the Latin language become parts of the German civilization, but still more extensively were the numerous little peculiarities of the Roman world preserved in the middle ages. German agriculture acquired from the Romans the greater part of its implements, also wheat, barley, and much of the remaining produce. The most ancient of our finer kinds of fruit are of Roman origin, equally so our wine, many garden flowers, and almost all our vegetables; also the oldest woollen fabrics, cotton and silk stuffs, and all the oldest machines, as for example, watermills, and the first mining and foundry works; likewise innumerable other things, even to the oldest forms of our dress, house utensils, chairs, tables, cupboards, and even the panels of our folding doors. And if it were possible to measure how much in our life is gathered from antiquity, or from primitive German invention, we should still, after the lapse of fifteen centuries, find so much that is Roman in our fields, gardens, and houses, on our bodies, nay, even in our souls, that one may well have a right to inquire whether our primeval ancestors were more under the protection of Father Jove or of the wild Woden. Thus amongst numberless others, the despised race of Gladiators, Histrions, and Thymelei--or jesters, were preserved throughout the storm of migration, and spread from Rome among the barbarian races. They introduced amongst the bloody hordes of Vandals the dissolute Roman pantomime; they stood before the huts of the Frank chiefs, and piped and played foreign melodies, which had perhaps once come with the orgies of the Asiatic gods to Rome; they intermingled with the Gothic congregation, which poured out of the newly built church into the churchyard, and there opened their chests in order to show a monkey in a red jacket as a foreign prodigy, or produced the grotesque figures of old Latin puppets, the _maccus_, _bucco_, _papus_, and whatever else the ancient fathers called our jack-puddings, for the amusement of the young parishioners, who opened wide their large blue eyes at these foreign wonders. Meanwhile other members of the band of jugglers offered on payment, to execute gymnastic games before the warriors of the community, which they performed with sharp weapons and all the artifices and cunning of the Roman circus; then these foolhardy men formed a ring and carried on with passionate eagerness, for the sake of pay, the dangerous hazards of the combat, which the spectators admired the more, the bloodier it became, whilst they held the unfortunates, who thus struggled for money, in no greater consideration than a couple of wolves or hungry dogs. But for the distinguished spectators there were other more enticing artists. Women also roved with the men amongst the German