spirit of hardy enterprise, these daring adventurers were likely
to become formidable adversaries to all who opposed them. The
peaceful inhabitants of the countries on which they rushed could
not long withstand the energy of men acting under such powerful
motives of exertion. And when they fell in with any tribes like
their own, the contest was a struggle for existence, and they
fought with a desperate courage, inspired by the rejection that
death was the punishment of defeat and life the prize of victory.

In these savage contests many tribes must have been utterly
exterminated. Some, probably, perished by hardship and famine.
Others, whose leading star had given them a happier direction,
became great and powerful tribes, and, in their turns, sent off
fresh adventurers in search of still more fertile seats. The
prodigious waste of human life occasioned by this perpetual
struggle for room and food was more than supplied by the mighty
power of population, acting, in some degree, unshackled from the
consent habit of emigration. The tribes that migrated towards the
South, though they won these more fruitful regions by continual
battles, rapidly increased in number and power, from the
increased means of subsistence. Till at length the whole
territory, from the confines of China to the shores of the
Baltic, was peopled by a various race of Barbarians, brave,
robust, and enterprising, inured to hardship, and delighting in
war. Some tribes maintained their independence. Others ranged
themselves under the standard of some barbaric chieftain who led
them to victory after victory, and what was of more importance,
to regions abounding in corn, wine, and oil, the long wished for
consummation, and great reward of their labours. An Alaric, an
Attila, or a Zingis Khan, and the chiefs around them, might fight