Try to conceive such to yourselves, and you have the old Markman,
Allman, Goth, Lombard, Saxon, Frank. And the notion may be more than
a mere metaphor. Races, like individuals, it has been often said,
may have their childhood, their youth, their manhood, their old age,
and natural death. It is but a theory--perhaps nothing more. But at
least, our race had its childhood. Their virtues, and their sad
failings, and failures, I can understand on no other theory. The
nearest type which we can see now is I fancy, the English sailor, or
the English navvy. A great, simple, honest, baby--full of power and
fun, very coarse and plain spoken at times: but if treated like a
human being, most affectionate, susceptible, even sentimental and
superstitious; fond of gambling, brute excitement, childish
amusements in the intervals of enormous exertion; quarrelsome among
themselves, as boys are, and with a spirit of wild independence which
seems to be strength; but which, till it be disciplined into loyal
obedience and self-sacrifice, is mere weakness; and beneath all a
deep practical shrewdness, an indomitable perseverance, when once
roused by need. Such a spirit as we see to this day in the English
sailor--that is the nearest analogue I can find now. One gets hints
here and there of what manner of men they were, from the evil day,
when, one hundred and two years before Christ, the Kempers and
Teutons, ranging over the Alps toward Italy, 300,000 armed men and
15,000 mailed knights with broad sword and lances, and in their
helmets the same bulls'-horns, wings, and feathers, which one sees
now in the crests of German princes, stumbled upon Marius and his
Romans, and were destroyed utterly, first the men, then the women,
who like true women as they were, rather than give up their honour to
the Romans, hung themselves on the horns of the waggon-oxen, and were
trampled to death beneath their feet; and then the very dogs, who
fought on when men and women were all slain--from that fatal day,