was desirous to uphold; by a vigilant policy, which they contentedly obeyed; and by laws, wise in their origin and general tenor, but often pursuing human actions with inquisitorial severity; with vindictive jealousy; with sanguinary punishments, and with a minuteness and subtlety, which destroyed individual freedom, and bounded public improvement. They have usually loved religion; though they have made it a slavery, whose established superstitions it was treasonable to resist. They erected temples, oracles, and altars; they divided the energies and attributes of the Supreme Being, into distinct personalities, which they adored as divinities; made images and mythologies of each; devised and established a ceremonial worship, and permanent priesthood, which has usually been intimately connected with their political government; and made the sanctioned teachers of the belief, morals and main opinions of their people.

BUT these civilized nations, notwithstanding all their improvements, and from the operation of some, have degenerated into sensuality; into the debasing vices, and to effeminate frivolities. The love of money, and a rapaciousness for its acquisition; and the necessities and false emulation, which continual luxuries create, have dissolved their social morality, and substituted a refined, but persevering and ever-calculating selfishness, for that mutual benevolence which reason desires; which Christianity now enjoins; and which our best sympathies suggest. Superstition, irreligion, and despotism increase, as the moral attachments to probity and order lessen; and yet by their increase assist to undermine both loyalty and patriotism, as well as public happiness.

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FACTIOUS Violences on the one hand; legal oppressions and persecutions on the other; and an augmenting soldiery, every day becoming dangerous to the authorities that need them, from a practical sense of their own importance and power; and every day enfeebled by inefficient chiefs, because the promotion of talent is dangerous to its employers, and is impeded by the claims of the interested and powerful; -have often increased the evils of a voluptuary civilization, till states have subsided from secret and selfish disaffection, into feeble and disunited masses; which enemies have shaken, and powerful invaders at last subdued. Their mental progress, from all these causes, has been usually checked into that limited and stationary knowledge, soon becoming comparative ignorance, into which, even the cultivation and social comforts of civilization have hitherto invariably sunk; and from which the irruptions, spirit, and agencies of the Nomadic tribes, or the newer kingdoms which they have founded, have repeatedly rescued the human race. Perhaps another marking feature may be mentioned of the political state of the ancient civilized nations - and this was the want of an hereditary and landed Aristocracy. A civic class of this sort, like all human inventions, has its own peculiar evils: but it is more connected with the public emancipation from either regal or sacerdotal despotism than is usually imaginedand accordingly it has chiefly prevailed among the Nomadic or barbaric nations, and perhaps originated among them. From them it has manifestly descended to modern Europe and to ourselves. THE other important part of the ancient population that from which we have sprung- which the civilized world always contemplated with dis

dain, and frequently with horror, comprised those, who under various names, of which the Kimmerians, Kelts, Scythians, Goths, and Germans, are the most interesting to us, long preferred a wilder, roaming, and more independent life.

By these, the forests and the hills; the unbounded range of nature; the solitude of her retreats; the hardy penury of her heaths; the protection of her morasses; and the unrestricted freedom of personal exertion and individual humour; (though with all the privations, dangers, wars, and necessities that attend self-dependance, and even human vicinity, unassociated by effective government and vigilant laws,) have yet been preferred to crowded cities and confused habitations; to petty occupations and contented submission; to unrelaxing self-government and general tranquillity.

THIS NOMADIC class of mankind was composed of distinct families, that multiplied into separate tribes, living insulated from each other; and rarely coalescing into nations; though sometimes confederating for the purposes of war and depredation. Their primeval state was, in some, that of the shepherd, and in others, of the hunter. Or if any migratory clans paused a while for agriculture, they quitted the soil after they had reaped the harvest; and sought out new plains to consume and to abandon; new woods to range, and new game to chase. Too fond of individual liberty probably the first stimulus to many in their separation from civilized society in the ages that followed its first great fracture, and too moveable and too jealous of restricting laws, to have a regular go- they became fierce, proud, and iras

vernment,

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BOOK cible; easily excited, rugged in manners, boisterous in temper, and implacable in resentments. Looking on the kingdoms and cities of refined life with contempt for its effeminate habits, and with the eye of rapacity for its tempting abundance, all their intercourse with it was war, depredation, and captivity. Sometimes multiplying too rapidly for the produce of their locality, they moved in large bodies to regions unoccupied, or incapable of resisting them; and, with their wives, families, and humble property, transported themselves forcibly from one country to another, to be often again, by some more numerous or warlike tribe, dispossessed of their new soil, or to be destroyed, in wars which were usually exterminations. Revolting as these habits are to our better and happier feelings, yet they served at that period to penetrate the wild earth; to subdue the exuberance of excessive vegetation, and to begin the first processes of preparing the unpeopled world for the cultivation and settlements of an improved posterity. They levelled some forests, and made roads through others: they found out the fords of rivers, the passes of the mountains, and the permeable parts of the insalubrious marshes. Their wars and depredations; their ravages and restless dispositions, were perpetually clearing new ground for human cultivation; and making new channels for human intercourse, through unknown countries. Their vicissitudes, though perpetuating their ferocity, yet kept them under particular excitement; and nourished hardy and active bodies.

BUILDING their rude huts in the woods for easier defence, every invader that dislodged them, and proclaimed his triumph by his conflagrations, only

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drove them to explore and people more inaccessible CHAP. solitudes; and rendered the district they quitted, unfit for barbaric occupation; but more adapted to become the residence of peaceful colonists. By their desultory movements, the domesticated animals, most useful to mankind, were diffusely scattered; the savage beasts destroyed, and new germs of future tribes were every where deposited; till some branches or other of the Nomadic tribes had moved, from the Asiatic Bosphorus, to the farthest shores of the European continent. Of these, the Kimmerians were the most advanced in the north-west; and the Kelts towards the west and south.

IN this state, a new description of society became perpetuated and diffused, in which the greatest degree of individual liberty was exerted and allowed, that could be made compatible with any social combination.

LIBERTY was the spring and principle of their political associations; and pervaded the few civil institutions which their habits required, and their humours permitted. Neither chief nor priest was suffered to have much power. Influence, not authority, was the characteristic of the shadowy government which they respected; nobility arose among them from successful war; and petty conquests of an hostile soil laid the foundation of a

territorial aristocracy. The power and property of these fortunate adventurers being held, as they had been acquired, by the sword, they were governable only so far as they chose to assent; and the free man who lived in society with them, being neither less warlike, less irritable, nor more submitting, it was the sacred custom of almost all their tribes,