"independence"; Scotland imposed a limit to the victories of the Roman
People, Scaliger says in his compliments to Buchanan:

_Imperii fuerat Romani Scotia lines._

But it may be questioned, whether it were an unmixed blessing, to be
excluded from the Empire; and to offer a sullen resistance to its
inestimable gifts of humane life, of manners, and of civility.

To these things, the Germans also have manifested a strong dislike; and
they are more censurable than the Scotch, because all their knowledge of
the Romans was not derived from the intercourse of war. "The Germany" of
Tacitus is a document, that has been much discussed; and these discussions
may be numbered among the most flagrant examples of literary intemperance:
but this will not surprise us, when we allow for the structure of mind,
the language, and the usual productions of those, to whom the treatise is
naturally of the greatest importance. In the description of the Germans,
Tacitus goes out of his way to laugh at the "licentia vetustatis," "the
debauches of pedants and antiquarians;" as though he suspected the
fortunes of his volume, and the future distinctions of the Teutonic
genius. For sane readers, it will be enough to remark, that the Germany of
Tacitus was limited, upon the west, by the natural and proper boundary of
the Rhine; that it embraced a portion of the Low Countries; and that,
although he says it was confined within the Danube, yet the separation is
not clear between the true Germans and those obscurer tribes, whose
descendants furnish a long enumeration of titles to the present melancholy
sovereign of the House of Austria. Gibbon remarks, with his usual sense,
"In their primitive state of simplicity and independence, the Germans were
surveyed by the discerning eye, and delineated by the masterly pencil of
Tacitus, the first historian who supplied the science of philosophy to the