内容简介：
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION. HISTORY OF THE FRENCH LANGUAGE. Caesar tells us that he found in Gaul three races, differing in speech, manners, and laws: the Belgae in the north, the Aquitani between the Garonne and the Pyrenees, and in the centre the Gallic or Celtic race. The Belgae and the Celts were in reality of the same stock, while the Aquitani were partly Iberians (that is, dwellers on the banks of the Ebro), and their language has perhaps survived in the Basque or Euskarian tongue. Thus then almost all the soil of France was occupied by Celts, who were so named from one of their most important confederations; they were men tall and fair, eager for excitement and noise, men whose ambition was to fight well and to speak well. ' The Gauls,' says Cato the Elder, ' give themselves passionately to two things, debate of arms and debate of speech.' Their civilisation, which was fairly advanced in point of industry and agriculture, and was an example of an original and interesting political organisation, might have developed into a condition of things yet more important, had it not been cut short and rendered powerless by the Roman conquest1. For how many ages did they inhabit Gaul? 1 It may be stated in passing that the stone monuments called celtiques in France (dol-men, men-hir, etc.) clearly do not come What was it that drove them to the shores of the ocean ? There is no reply1; for the Gauls could not write, and their authentic history begins from the moment when Gaul laid down her independence at the feet of those Roman conquerors, to whom we are indebted for the scattered knowledge we possess as to the life, social condition, manners, religion of the conquered race: it may with truth be said that the history of Gaul begins on the very day on which she ceases to have an indepe...