her fostering Saints, and to Heaven her helpful Angels.
14. Of this low-nestling, speechless, harmless, infinitely submissive, infinitely serviceable order of being, no Historian ever takes the smallest notice, except when it is robbed, or slain. I can give you no picture of it, bring to your ears no murmur of it, nor cry. I can only show you the absolute 'must have been' of its unrewarded past, and the way in which all we have thought of, or been told, is founded on the deeper facts in its history, unthought of, and untold.
15. The main mass of this innocent and invincible peasant life is, as I have above told you, grouped in the fruitful and temperate districts of (relatively) mountainous Europe,—reaching, west to east, from the Cornish Land's End to the mouth of the Danube. Already, in the times we are now dealing with, it was full of native passion—generosity—and intelligence capable of all things. Dacia gave to Rome the four last of her great Emperors,[1]—
- ↑ Claudius, Aurelian, Probus, Constantius; and after the division of the empire, to the East, Justinian. "The emperor Justinian was born of an obscure race of Barbarians, the inhabitants of a wild and desolate country, to which the names of Dardania, of Dacia, and of Bulgaria have been successively applied. The names of these Dardanian peasants are Gothic, and almost English. Justinian is a translation of Uprauder (upright); his father, Sabatius,—in Graeco-barbarous language, Stipes—was styled in his village 'Istock' (Stock)."—Gibbon, beginning of chap. xl. and note.
