“The church of the Albigenses had been drowned in blood. Those supposed heretics had been swept away from the soil of France. The rest of the Languedocian people had been over-whelmed with calamity, slaughter, and devastation. The estimates transmitted to us of the numbers of the invaders and of the slain, are such as almost surpass belief. We can neither verify nor correct them; but we certainly know, that, during a long succession of years, Languedoc had been invaded by armies more numerous than had ever before been brought together in European warfare since the fall of the Roman empire. We know that these hosts were composed of men inflamed by bigotry, and unrestrained by discipline,--that they had neither military pay nor magazines,--that they provided for all their wants by the sword, living at the expense of the country, and seizing at their pleasure both the harvests of the peasants and the merchandise of the citizens. More than three-fourths of the landed proprietors had been despoiled of their fiefs and castles. In hundreds of villages, every inhabitant had been massacred. There was scarcely a family of which some member had not fallen beneath the sword of De Montfort’s soldiers, or been outraged by their brutality. Since the sack of Rome by the Vandals, the European world had never mourned over a national disaster so wide in its extent, or so fearful in its character.”[7] From the beginning of the thirteenth century to the present time everything has had a tendency to amalgamate the component ethnological elements of France--to make it a country of one nation, rather than the area of many varieties. Its _civil_ history, however, is the source for our knowledge of all this. * * * * * The ethnology of Belgium is comparatively simple. Its elements are the same as those of Northern France,--Keltic, German, and Roman; for the analysis (as has perhaps been observed) grows simpler when we passed the Seine. And this was but natural, as the scene receded from the great centre of conquest and the great points of international contact. In Belgium the Roman element is somewhat less, the occupation being somewhat more imperfect; whilst the Keltic basis is referable to the Belgic variety--a point in which Picardy, French Flanders, Artois, and part of Champagne agree.