conquest afforded some relief for the chagrins of internal politics. By it Marius, Sulla, and Pompeius had become powerful. If Cæsar wanted to eclipse them all, he must present Rome with a new province, the most powerful of all bribes. It was in this spirit that he set out for Gaul. If his ulterior motive was selfish it is certain that he threw himself heart and soul, with all the burning energy of which his tireless spirit was capable, into the work of conquest and civilisation. [Illustration: Gallic Pottery] And what a work it was! Archæology is now beginning to prove to history that the so-called barbarians were by no means always savages. Even the “naked woad-stained” Britons had their arts and industries and political systems. The Gauls, when Cæsar attacked them, were well on the road to civilisation. Druidism was a declining force, town-life was beginning, and there was even a fairly artistic coinage. The Gallic pottery is by no means destitute of beauty. As soldiers the Gauls showed many of the qualities of their descendants, a devoted impetuosity in the charge, coupled with a lack of tenacity in resistance which always cost them dear. Much of Cæsar’s success was due to his skill in dividing them against themselves, but many of his difficulties arose from their fickle disposition. Mommsen, like a true Bismarckian German, has a striking comparison of the ancient Gallic Celt with the modern Irishman. [Illustration: Gallic pottery] “On the eve,” he says, “of parting from this remarkable nation, we may be allowed to call attention to the fact that in the accounts of the ancients as to the Celts on the Loire and the Seine we find almost every one of the characteristic traits which we are accustomed to recognise as marking the Irish. Every feature reappears: the laziness in the culture of the fields; the delight in tippling and brawling; the ostentation ... the droll humour ... the hearty delight in singing and reciting the deeds of past ages, and the most decided talent for rhetoric and poetry; the curiosity--no trader was allowed to pass before he had told in the open street what he knew, or did not know, in the shape of news--and the extravagant credulity which acted on such accounts ... the childlike piety which sees in the priest a father and asks him for advice in all things” (this, by the way, was apparently a characteristic of the contemporary Germans also), “the unsurpassed fervour of national feeling, and the closeness with which those who are fellow-countrymen cling together almost like one family in opposition to the stranger; the inclination to rise in revolt under the first chance leader that presents himself, but at the same time the utter incapacity to preserve a self-reliant courage equally remote from presumption and pusillanimity, to perceive the right time for waiting and for striking, to obtain or even barely to tolerate any organisation, any sort of fixed military or political discipline.