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
study of facts. The expressive conciseness of his descriptions has
deserved to exercise the diligence of innumerable antiquarians, and to
excite the genius and penetration of the philosophic historians of our own
time." Upon a few sentences out of the "Germania"; which relate to the
kings, to the holding of land, to the public assemblies, and to the army;
an imposing structure of English constitutional history has been erected:
our modern historians look upon this treatise with singular approval;
because it shows them, they say, the habits of their own forefathers in
their native settlements. They profess to be enchanted with all they read;
and, in their works, they betray their descent from the ancestors they
admire. Gibbon says, prettily, "Whenever Tacitus indulges himself in those
beautiful episodes, in which he relates some domestic transaction of the
Germans or of the Parthians, his principal object is to relieve the
attention of the reader from an uniform scene of vice and misery.
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