The Varni having remained settled near the mouths of the Rhine
till near the year 500, there is strong, probability that they
were the people alluded to. But names and histories, which may on
this point appear of such little importance, acquire considerable
interest when we reflect that these Salians, driven from their
settlement, became the conquerors of France; that those Saxons
who forced them on their career of conquest were destined to
become the masters of England; and that these two petty tribes,
who battled so long for a corner of marshy earth, carried with
them their reciprocal antipathy while involuntarily deciding
the destiny of Europe.

The defeat of the Franks was fatal to those peoples who had become
incorporated with the Romans; for it was from them that the exiled
wanderers, still fierce in their ruin, and with arms in their hands,
demanded lands and herds; all, in short, which they themselves had
lost. From the middle of the fourth century to the end of the
fifth, there was a succession of invasions in this spirit, which
always ended by the subjugation of a part of the country; and which
was completed about the year 490, by Clovis making himself master
of almost the whole of Gaul. Under this new empire not a vestige
of the ancient nations of the Ardennes was left. The civilized
population either perished or was reduced to slavery, and all
the high grounds were added to the previous conquests of the
Salians.

But the maritime population, when once possessed of the whole
coast, did not seek to make the slightest progress toward the
interior. The element of their enterprise and the object of their
ambition was the ocean; and when this hardy and intrepid race