within their rude fortifications, they grew in the traditions of their descendants, and of the other tribes whom in course of time they either subdued or absorbed, to be regarded as the founders of Rome. They did not accomplish their high destiny without trials and reverses. More powerful neighbouring kingdoms looked on askance during the days of their rise, and found opportunity more than once to overthrow their city and all but subdue their state. Their former brethren, the Celts,[141] who had been beforehand of all the Aryan races in entering Europe, and now formed the most powerful people in this quarter of the globe, several times swept down upon them like a devastating storm. But after each reverse the infant colony arose with renewed Antæan vigour. Thus in Italy, the development from the tribal to the national state was internal. No precocious maritime race awoke in many different centres the seeds of nationality; rather this nationality was a gradual growth from one root, the slow response to a central attractive force. The energy of Rome did not go out in sea adventure, or in the colonization of distant lands; but it was firmly bent to absorb the different people of her own peninsula, people of like blood with herself, but in every early stage of culture from an almost nomadic condition to one of considerable advancement in the arts of peace. [Sidenote: The Celts.] When from the Greeks and Romans we turn to the Celts and Teutons, we must descend much lower in the records of history before we can get any clear glimpse at these. The Celts, who were probably the first Aryans in Europe, seem gradually to have been forced farther and farther west by the incursions of other peoples. At one time, however, we have evidence that they extended eastward, at least as far as the Rhine, and over all that northern portion of Italy--now Lombardy and part of Sardinia--which to the Romans went by the name of Cisalpine Gaul. The long period of subjection to the Roman rule which Gaul experienced, obliterated in that country all traces of its early Celtic manners, and we are reduced for our information concerning these to the pages of Roman historians, or to the remains of Celtic laws and customs preserved in the western homes of the race. The last have only lately received a proper attention. The most primitive Irish code--the Brehon laws--has been searched for traces of the primitive Celtic life. From both our sources we gather that the Celts were divided into tribes regarded as members of one family. These clans were ruled over by chiefs, whose offices were hereditary, or very early became so. They were thus but slightly advanced out of the most primitive conditions,--they cannot be described as a nation. Had they been so, extensive and warlike as they were, they would have been capable of subduing all the other infant nationalities of Aryan folk. As it was, as mere combinations of tribes under some powerful chieftain