Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1827) Vol 1.djvu/417

OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 393 convenient distances. From the neighbourhood of CHAP. Newstadt and Ratisbon on the Danube, it stretched L_ across hills, valleys, rivers, and morasses, as far as Wimpfen on the Necker, and at length terminated on the banks of the Rhine, after a winding course of near two hundred miles ". This important barrier, uniting the two mighty streams that protected the provinces of Europe, seemed to fill up the vacant space through which the barbarians, and particularly the Alemanni, could penetrate with the greatest facihty into the heart of the empire. But the experience of the world from China to Britain, has exposed the vain attempt of for- tifying any extensive tract of country An active enemy, who can select and vary his points of attack, must, in the end, discover some feeble spot, or some un- guarded moment. The strength, as well as the atten- tion of the defenders is divided ; and such are the blind effects of terror on the firmest troops, that a line broken in a single place, is almost instantly deserted. The fate of the wall which Probus erected, may con- firm the general observation. Within a few years after his death, it was overthrown by the Alemanni. Its scattered ruins, universally ascribed to the power of the daemon, now serve only to excite the wonder of the Swabian peasant. Among the useful conditions of peace imposed by Introduc- Probus on the vanquished nations of Germany, was settlement the obligation of supplying the Roman army with six- of the bar- teen thousand recruits, the bravest and most robust of their youth. The emperor dispersed them through all the provinces, and distributed this dangerous rein- forcement in small bands, of fifty or sixty each, among " See Notes de I'Abbe de la Bleterie a la Germanie de Tacite, p. 183. His account of the wall is chiefly borrowed (as he says himself) from the Alsatia Illustrata of Schoepflin. " See Recherches sur les Chinois et les Egyptiens, torn. ii. p. 81 — 102. The anonymous author is well acquainted with the globe in general, and with Germany in particular : with regard to the latter, he quotes a work of M. Hanselman ; but he seems to confound the wall of Probus, designed against the Alemanni, with the fortification of the Mattiaci, constructed in the neighbourhood of Francfort against the Calti.