“Thus, for example, the Burgundians, before their irruption to Gaul, were remarkable for their skill as artizans; and in the poems in which, not long after that event, they were described by Sidonius Apollinaris, we have the best attestation of their resemblance to the kind and simple-hearted German of our own days. Thus also the Gothic people, almost immediately after their settlement in Aquitaine, manifested a singular aptitude for a yet higher civilization. For, if St. Jerome was correctly informed, Ataulph their king seriously projected the substitution of a new Gothic for the old Roman empire; a scheme in which the character of Julius was to be ascribed to Alaric, that of Augustus being reserved for the projector himself. Euric, the successor of Ataulph, filled his court at Toulouse with rhetoricians, poets, and grammarians; and coveted (and not altogether in vain) the applause of the Italian critics for the pure Latinity of his despatches. “The Franks, on the other hand, were a barbarous people, and their history is in fact a barbaric history. At their entrance into Gaul they were worshippers of Odin, and believed that the gates of the Walhalla rolled back spontaneously on their hinges to admit the warrior who had dyed, with the blood of his enemies, the battle-field on which he had himself fallen. From their settlements on the lower Rhine they had sometimes marched to the defence of the Romano-Gallic province, but more frequently and gladly to the invasion of it. Their appetite for rapine was insatiate, unrestrained, and irresistible. In war they were the prototypes of the Norman pirates of a later age, or of the West Indian buccaneers of more modern times. In peace they were the very counterpart of the North American Indians, as depicted by the early travellers in Canada; a comparison which almost every commentator on Tacitus has instituted and verified.” Now I have great doubts about the superior civilization of the conquerors of Burgundy, Alsatia, and Franche-Comté; but these arise from a view, perhaps, peculiar to myself, of the nature of the Frank confederacies. I believe the word Frank to have distinguished the Germans who were independent of Rome from those who were in allegiance to the empire, and, consequently, that it might be borne by different divisions of the German stock, and by wholly unconnected alliances. More than this--if it separated the Romanized from the independent Germans, it separated, to a certain extent, the rude from the refined, the Pagan from the Christian. Now, of these two classes, the rude independent Pagans were the more likely conquerors of Burgundy and Franche-Comté; in which case the differences of their civilization is likely to have been inconsiderable. It is true that they may have been Christianized by time--but so were the Salians of Clovis. On the other hand, their contact with the undoubtedly Christian Goths of Dauphiné and Languedoc, had a truly civilizing tendency.